Dr. David Arditi

When I first read Dialectic of Enlightenment, the chapter entitled “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” had a profound impact on my research interests. The first time I read it, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer struck me as prophetic with their description of the Culture Industry that continued to be more apt than in the 1940s when they published the book. As time goes on, I see the insights of the main thesis of the book as even more relevant. Horkheimer and Adorno wrote the book at a time when authoritarianism chased them from Germany to avoid the Holocaust, only to arrive in the United States to find different forms of totalitarianism. They argued that during the Enlightenment scientific rationality displaced myth as the dominant system to explain the world. However, rationality became its own dogmatic system that closed critical thinking and lead to oppression (ultimately, the Holocaust and nuclear weapons). Today, with the new rise of global authoritarianism, Dialectic of Enlightenment provides a framework to analyze the increasing subjectivization of facts in an environment where we experience information overload.