The 1947 book edition of Dialectic of Enlightenment systematically laundered Marxist vocabulary.

Evidence

The book edition of the Philosophical Fragments, published by the émigré publishers Querido in Amsterdam in 1947 under the title Dialectic of Enlightenment, contained numerous small changes in comparison with the mimeographed edition of 1944. The word capitalism' was changed to existing conditions’; capital' was changed to economic system’; capitalist bloodsuckers' became knights of industry’; class society' became domination’ or order'; ruling class’ became rulers'. A sentence such as That would be a classless society’ was omitted. This form of self-censorship was not new; it was an Institute tradition. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 425

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to textual-critical work on Dialectic of Enlightenment between the 1944 mimeograph and the 1947 Querido edition.
• DEEPTHINKING: A canonical text’s celebrated vocabulary of ‘domination’ and ‘existing conditions’ may itself be a concession to American patrons — worth sitting with.
• DEFINE: Fixes the specific lexical substitutions that define the received text of Dialectic of Enlightenment.