The Dialectic of Enlightenment rests on two uncredited themes from Weber and Klages

Evidence

Against the background of a generalization of Hegel’s critique, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, of the unleashing of enlightenment, two oddly interwoven themes lay at the heart of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. The most significant representatives of these two themes, Max Weber, the sociologist of modern rationality, on the one hand, and Ludwig Klages, the philosophical critic of the modern domination of nature, on the other, were not mentioned in the book. The first of these two themes was the view of Western civilization as a process of rationalization, the ambivalence of which Weber had aptly described with the concept of disenchantmentdisenchantment referring both to the breaking of a magical spell and to the escape from a curse. The second theme was the attribution of the state of the world at each stage of its development to a correspondingly harmonious or hostile relation between humanity and nature. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1368

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the dual meaning of Weber’s disenchantment — both breaking a spell and escaping a curse — which is central to how the term functions in the Dialectic.
• XREF: Connects to Horkheimer/Adorno’s unacknowledged debts, relevant to the broader critical theory task of tracing the lineage of the Dialectic’s central claims. — connects to: Klages defined the dream mood through passivity, felt distance, and fleetingness — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 815; Benjamin deliberately inverted Klages’ backward gaze into a forward-looking dialectics. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 853; Weber built Protestantism and capitalism as one-sided ideal types against Marxist reductionism (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Weber built Protestantism and capitalism as one-sided ideal types against Marxist reductionism #corroborates (0.75)
• Weber reconciled hermeneutics and positivism through ideal-type heuristic models #corroborates (0.70) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 334