Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente.

THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION

First edition. 8vo. 310, [2] pp. Original brown cloth, spine and front cover lettered in gilt (heavy browning to endpapers, book block just starting to split at title page, contents otherwise generally clean; light wear to extremities, notwithstanding a very good copy). Amsterdam, Querido Verlag N.V.

One of the most important and pessimistic works of post-war social and political thought, best-known for introducing the concept of the 'culture industry' to describe emergent forms of mass consumer culture.

Written as the Second World War drew to a close, Dialectic of Enlightenment poses the question of how the heart of European thought could have incubated the rise of genocidal fascism. In a powerfully incisive joint reading of Kant and de Sade, the failure of the Enlightenment project is found by the pair to be embedded in the foundation of its very premises; likewise, state intervention in the market is seen to have erased the contradictions with which Marx envisioned revolution to be inevitable, sliding Germany towards fascism and thereafter an inescapable liberalism.

Taken up en masse by the New Left of the 1960s due to its blending of philosophy, politics, culture and sociology, Dialectic of Enlightenment would become an exemplary text in the emergence of 'critical theory'.

Stock Code: 252674