The Dialectic of Enlightenment targeted the whole Western rationalist tradition, not just Marxism

Evidence

Marx of course was by no means the major target of the Dialectic. Horkheimer and Adorno were far more ambitious. The entire Enlightenment tradition, that process of allegedly liberating demystification that Max Weber had called die Entzauherung der Well (the disenchantment of the world), was their real target. Here they followed Lukacs’s lead in History and Class Consciousness, where Weber’s notion of rationalization was given a greater critical edge by being connected to the concept of reification. Horkheimer had in fact always been an interested reader of Weber. In “Reason and Self-Preservation” he adopted the basic analysis of Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism for his own purposes. “Protestantism,” he wrote, “was the strongest force in the extension of cold, rational individuality… . In the place of work for the sake of salvation appeared work for work’s sake, profit for profit’s sake; the entire world became simply material… From Leonardo to Henry Ford, there was no other path than through religious introversion.” — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 781

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Weber’s Protestant Ethic and Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness already cited in earlier chapters of this book; also echoes the asceticism theme of Weber’s thesis. — connects to: The Frankfurt School’s notion of Enlightenment expanded to cover all Western thought — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 778; Orientalism is a dialectical feedback loop embedded in Enlightenment structures, not mere ideology — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 321; Enlightenment philosophy took Western civilizational superiority as its founding question. (+11 more)

Broader Connections

• Enlightenment rationalism generated new monsters instead of eradicating them #expands (0.80) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 352
• Totalitarianism expresses rather than repudiates Enlightenment’s inherent dynamic. #expands (0.80) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 786
• Enlightenment philosophy took Western civilizational superiority as its founding question. #expands (0.78)
• The Enlightenment’s core project displaced local moralities with universal rational ones #expands (0.78) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 71
• Orientalism is a dialectical feedback loop embedded in Enlightenment structures, not mere ideology #expands (0.75) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 321
• Enlightenment universalism, despite Eurocentrism, respected non-European civilizations #contradicts (0.75)
• Enlightenment social science ranked all societies on one West-defined developmental scale #expands (0.75)
• Sociology’s fragmentation stems from Enlightenment faith in transcendental rationality #expands (0.72) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 14
• Radical Enlightenment critique targets religion rather than reason itself #qualifies (0.72)
• Enlightenment’s conversion into positivism has been historically confirmed. #expands (0.72)
• Western political thought has systematically subordinated imagination to rationality #expands (0.72) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 147
• Marxism absorbed and incorporated preexisting national modes of thought rather than displacing them #qualifies (0.72)