1. I largely pass over the Marxist background of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. John Cumming [New York: Continuum Books, 1972]), first, because I assume it to be unproblematic; second, because I have little to add to the voluminous scholarship on the critical theorists’ place in the tradition of Western Marxism; and third, because I am deliberately reading Dialectic out of its traditional context in order to generate new insights. Putting it in the context of Foucault, Nietzsche, and tragedy is meant, not only to revitalize a book fallen into disuse, but also to demonstrate the ability of classical thought to address the important issues of postmodernity.

2. My reading of Dialectic is a sympathetic one. I am not overly concerned to defend some of its more contentious claims, for instance, that German fascism is to be deduced from the logic of the dominant ratio itself, or that capitalism, fascism, and totalitarianism share the same fundamental logic. I am highly critical of Horkheimer and Adorno’s views on the culture industry and the abolition of the individual, although I also believe their position has merit. After all, in the face of the integrative powers of the administrative state and the capitalist economy, the forces of popular culture have not yet brought the revolution. I am most concerned here that the collaborative work of Horkheimer and Adorno be taken seriously again; that it be read in the context of Greek tragedy, and that Greek tragedy and classical thought in general be recognized as valuable sources for thinking about contemporary political and theoretical problems. The value of Dialectic of Enlightenment lies in its ability to teach us how tothink about the world of people and things, which, like Greek tragedy, it does by both precept and example.

3. Karen Hermassi, Polity and Theatre in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 3–24, offers a fine discussion of the tragic theater as an act of collective recollection.

4. “As much as Habermas places communication and language in the center of his theory, they almost always remain objects of theory, as though theory were a language beyond speech,” Rainer Nägele observes in “Freud, Habermas and the Dialectic of Enlightenment: On Real and Ideal Discourse,” New German Critique 22 (1981): 42–43.

5. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, p. 7.

6. Ibid., xvi.

7. Ibid., 3, xi.

8. Ibid., xiv.

9. This is truer of Horkheimer than of Adorno, who as early as 1931 had criticized the Marxian concept of totality, as well as the assumptions implicit in Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” in his lecture “The Actuality of Philosophy” (reprinted in Telos 31 (Spring 1977): 120–33. For the influence of contemporary historical events on the theoretical development of Horkheimer and Adorno, see Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Practice (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).

10. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, p. xi.

11. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum Books, 1973), p. 3.

12. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, p. 40; Christian Lenhardt, “The Wanderings of Enlightenment,” in On Critical Theory, ed. John O’Neill, pp. 52–53 (New York: Seabury Press, 1976); Dialectic, p. 42. Joel Whitebrook’s attempt in “The Politics of Redemption,” Telos 63 (Spring 1985), to distance himself from the so-called “politics of redemption” that he claims flows from Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s totalizing critique of reason is misguided in my view.

13. Horkheimer and Adorno see this logic at work in the structure of scientific thinking, in the development of philosophical systems, and in the phenomenon of culture as industry. Since I develop these themes at length below, I shall restrict my comments here to the dialectic between democracy and normalization.

14. To borrow the title of Martin Jay’s collection of essays on the Frankfurt School, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

15. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry Reconsidered” (1964), New German Critique 6 (Fall 1975).

16. I am thinking of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1964; repr., Penguin Books, 1977); see esp. pp. 286–87.

17. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 122 ff., argues a relationship between Greek tragedy and Plato’s dialogues.

18. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, ix.

19. Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, p. 126.

20. Ibid., p. 130.

21. Ibid., p. 127.

22. Ibid., p. 130.

23. Ibid., p. 134.

24. Ibid.

25. Timothy J. Reiss reads Greek tragedy this way in Tragedy and Truth: Studies in the Development of a Renaissance and Neoclassical Discourse (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press 1980), p. 21.

26. Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, p. 129.

27. Charles P. Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 232.

28. On the educative function of tragedy, see J. Peter Euben, ed., Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), esp. introduction and Stephen Salkever, “Tragedy and the Education of the Demos.”

29. On the eternal return of the same in the Oedipus plays, see Froma I. Zeitlin, “Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama,” in Euben, ed., Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, pp. 101–41.

30. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, xi.

31. Ibid., 17.

32. Ibid., xvii.

33. Cf. Walter Benjamin’s “Every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism” (Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt [New York: Schocken Books, 1969; repr., 1986], p. 256). Adorno elsewhere characterizes modernity’s psychological principle as “frigidity”—that is, as the capacity to see one’s fellows devoured without experiencing guilt or physical pain. Arendt comes to a similar conclusion, but calls it thoughtlessness: the inability to think from the standpoint of somebody else made it possible for Eichmann to efficiently organize mass murder (Eichmann in Jerusalem [1977], p. 49).

34. Although Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic interprets the reversal of enlightenment by means of Lukács’s concept of rationalization as reification, Lukács does not deal with fascism directly; see György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), esp. “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” pp. 83–222. And see Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), and Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1949; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).

35. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, p. 7.

36. Ibid., p. 5.

37. Ibid., p. xiv.

38. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1977), p. 278.

39. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, p. 5.

40. Ibid., p. 7.

41. Ibid., p. 8.

42. Ibid., p. 12.

43. Here Horkheimer and Adorno anticipate, e.g., Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977); and The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973).

44. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, p. 13.

45. Ibid., p. 36.

46. Ibid., p. 154.

47. The phrase “culture industry” was first used by Horkheimer and Adorno, who preferred it to “mass culture” because of the latter phrase’s populist connotations. They oppose “mass culture” not because it is democratic but precisely because it is not.

48. Theodor W. Adorno and George Simpson, “On Popular Music,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9, 1 (special issue, 1941): 48.

49. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, p. 120.

50. Ibid., p. 151.

51. Ibid., p. 153.

52. Ibid., p. 154.

53. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” p. 135.

54. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Boston: MIT Press, 1981), p. 128.

55. This account and appropriation of popular democratic culture and practice draws on Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), esp. ch. 3, “Jewels Brought from Bondage: Black Music and the Politics of Authenticity,” and Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent’s Tail Press, 1993); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); John Fiske, Reading the Popular (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990); Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979); Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1973); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (London: Picador; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986).

56. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, p. 82.

57. Ibid., p. 24.

58. Ibid., p. xiv.

59. David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 216.

60. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, p. 84.

61. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1977), p. 49.

62. Adorno, Negative Dialectics p. 183.

63. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984); Seyla Ben habib, “Modernity and the Aporias of Critical Theory,” New German Critique 49 (Fall 1981), and Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 147–85.

64. It is also this structure that the critics ignore when interpreting Dialectic.

65. Euben, ed., Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, introduction.

66. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy,” in id. and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Loyd (New York: Zone Books, 1980), pp. 32–33.

67. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, pp. 45–46.

68. Here is another instance in which a theme from Oedipus Tyrannos resonates with Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of Homer: we find the same confusing juxtaposition of hereditary entitlement (myth) and superior intellect (enlightenment) as grounds for political rule in Sophocles’ play.

69. Lenhardt, “Wanderings of Enlightenment,” p. 41.

70. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, p. 43.

71. Ibid., p. 34.

72. Lenhardt, “Wanderings of Enlightenment,” p. 44.

73. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, p. 49.

74. Lenhardt, “Wanderings of Enlightenment,” p. 47.

75. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, p. 54.

76. Ibid., pp. 54–55.

77. Lenhardt, “Wanderings of Enlightenment,” p. 48.

78. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 1: 382.

79. Susan Buck-Morss, The Origins of Negative Dialectics: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), p. 59.

80. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, p. xii.