Dialectic of Enlightenment was published in 1947 by Qu erida in Amsterdam. The Question and Answer section for The Dialectic of Enlightenment is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.. Ask Your Own Question One chapter of the Dialectic of Enlightenment is devoted entirely to anti-Semitism and its origins. The Dialectic of Enlightenment Questions and Answers. Read 234 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. In political philosophy: Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse. Dialectic of Enlightenment, perhaps the central text of the Frankfurt school, was written by Adorno and Max Horkheimer during these years in exile. The book, which fo und readers only gradually, has been out of print for some time. They warned that enlightened reason and societal freedom threaten to revert into blindness and oppression. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the celebration of reason by thinkers of the 18th-century Enlightenment had led to the development of technologically sophisticated but oppressive and inhumane modes of governance, exemplified in the 20th century by fascism and totalitarianism. Dialectic of Enlightenment book. Dialectic of Enlightenment is a thought-provoking introduction to the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. The dialectic of enlightenment is perceived by Adorno and Horkheimer not just in its historical context of the 18 th century, but rather in the broad sense of the human attempt to enforce order and meaning on reality, to try and understand the world for the purpose of taking over it, an attempt driven by western rationality for centuries. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno first identified the "dialectic of enlightenment" when fascism was on the rampage in Europe.