The Routledge Guidebook to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment

Composed whilst in exile in the United States during the Second World War, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is the most famous and influential text of the Frankfurt School. A theoretical exploration of history, modernity, and culture, its core warning of crisis and regression remains highly relevant today. However, it is also a notoriously complex work of philosophy.

The Routledge Guidebook to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is the first fully contextualized introduction to this foundational text in philosophy and social theory, addressing its central themes, reception, and influence. This Guidebook examines:

• The conceptual and intellectual background to Dialectic of Enlightenment.
• The ideas, themes, and arguments of the text.
• The reception and legacy of Dialectic of Enlightenment.

A comprehensive and clearly written guide to this important text, The Routledge Guidebook to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment will be invaluable to students coming to the work for the first time, as well as more advanced students and researchers in philosophy, politics, sociology, and the history of ideas.

Espen Hammer is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University, USA. He is the author of Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (2002), Adorno and the Political (Routledge, 2006), Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory (2011), Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe (2015), and After the Death of God: Secularization as a Philosophical Challenge from Kant to Nietzsche (2025). He edited German Idealism (Routledge, 2007), Theodor W. Adorno II (Routledge, 2015), and Kafka’s The Trial (2019), and co-edited The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School (2019), and A Companion to Adorno (2020).

Fred Rush is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, USA. He is the author of On Architecture (Routledge, 2009), and Irony and Idealism (2016). He edited The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory (2004), and co-edited Philosophy of Sculpture: Historical Problems, Contemporary Approaches (Routledge, 2020).