Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1st English Edition)

Author: Horkheimer, Max & Adorno, Theodor W.
Translator: Cumming, John
Title: Dialectic of Enlightenment
Publisher: Herder and Herder
Date: 1972
Place: New York
Dimensions: 8vo. 21.5cm x 14.5cm

xvii+258pp.
1st edition of the 1st English translation.

"What eventually would become the Dialectic of Enlightenment first entered the world in December 1944 as a mimeographed typescript of over three hundred pages distributed to friends and associates of the Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt School). Printed on the brown pasteboard cover was the original title: Philosophische Fragmente." Revised and stripped of its more Marxian currents, Querido in Amsterdam published Dialektik der Aufklärung in 1947. Though the work was primarily conceived and written in America, it is not until 1972 that an English translation appears, the current edition, published by Herder and Herder in New York.

Along with works like The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin and Eros and Civilisation by Herbert Marcuse, Dialectic of Enlightenment is a core text of Critical Theory, developed by members of the Frankfurt School at the Institute for Social Research founded at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1923. The work is a scathing critique of the project of the enlightenment, which, paradoxically for the authors, had led to a new kind of barbarism, evident in the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century and the culture industry.

Black cloth, gilt spine titles, Some spotting to the edges, small closed tear to top panel of DJ, else fine.

- Schmidt, J. Social Research. 1998.