The Dialectic of Enlightenment assembled scattered ideas into a theology-based philosophy of history

Evidence

Among these motifs were: Horkheimer’s advice to the Jews at the conclusion of his essay on The Jews and Europe'to recall their abstract monotheism, their rejection of the worship of images, their refusal to treat anything finite as infinite; the condition he had diagnosed in Egoism and the Freedom Movement’ and in Reason and Self-Preservation'the disdain for instinct and thought, on the part both of the ruling classes and of society as a whole; and Adorno's speculations on the mythic immanence of capitalism and reactionary’ art and philosophy and on the combination of construct and expression, consciousness and sensuality. In a fragmentary, sketchy form, all of this was now assembled into a philosophy of history and an assessment of the era which were implicitly based in theology. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1435

Categorization

• DEFINE: Enumerates the specific theological motifs absorbed into the dialectics project, useful for reference-level parsing of Horkheimer and Adorno’s positions.
• XREF: connects to: Dialectic of Enlightenment originated as a mimeographed 1942-44 typescript stripped of anti-capitalist vocabulary. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1362; The Dialectic of Enlightenment targeted the whole Western rationalist tradition, not just Marxism — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 781; The Western idea that history moves toward an endpoint descends from Christian eschatology — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 159

Broader Connections

• The Dialectic of Enlightenment targeted the whole Western rationalist tradition, not just Marxism #expands (0.90) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 781