The Enlightenment liberated man only to enslave him more effectively

Evidence

Now it appeared that the very existence of contradictions, or at least the consciousness of their existence, was in jeopardy, even though capitalism had not been superseded by socialism. In what Marcuse was later to make famous as “one-dimensional” society, the redeeming power of negation was almost totally absent. What was left in its place was a cruel parody of the dream of positive freedom. The Enlightenment, which had sought to liberate man, had ironically served to enslave him with far more effective means than ever before. Without a clear mandate for action, the only course open to those who could still escape the numbing power of the culture industry was to preserve and cultivate the vestiges of negation that still remained. “Philosophical theory itself cannot bring it about that either the barbarizing tendency or the humanistic outlook should prevail in the future,” Horkheimer warned. “However, by doing justice to those images and ideas that at given times dominated reality in the role of absolutes - e.g., the idea of the individual as it dominated the bourgeois era - and that have been relegated in the course of history, philosophy can function as a corrective of history, so to speak.” — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 833

Categorization

• XREF: Directly prefigures Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and the concept of repressive tolerance — connects to the broader critical-theory canon the reader is orienting toward. — connects to: The Enlightenment accepts only what conforms to computation and utility; Bourgeois Enlightenment traded freedom for self-preservation early on; Enlightenment serves domination even while attacking priestly falsehood. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 55 (+9 more)
• ADDENDUM: The claim that philosophy can act as a ‘corrective of history’ by honoring discarded absolute ideas like the bourgeois individual parallels the sacrificial logic in the reader’s published piece on sacrifice — ideas once held as absolutes that history relegates.

Broader Connections

• Enlightenment regresses into the very myth it claimed to escape #corroborates (0.90)
• Enlightenment does not eliminate myth but re-enters it as secularized domination #corroborates (0.90) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 46
• Enlightenment reason replicated the tyranny it rebelled against, now over nature #corroborates (0.88) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 182
• Enlightenment serves as a tool for making people smaller and more governable #expands (0.85) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 714
• Enlightenment ‘man’ served as a limit on power, not a target for correction #contradicts (0.82) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 126
• Enlightenment can be redeemed from blind domination by self-critique #responds-to (0.75)