The Frankfurt School saw Enlightenment’s collapse into totalitarianism as latent in its own reason

Evidence

When the Frankfurt School came, under the circumstances of fully empowered fascism, to examine the problem of “ideology,” they therefore had strong reasons to treat it as requiring not much more than the analysis of the mass manipulation of administered “illusions.” In their efforts to reconstruct how the Age of Reason had produced, as its result, the Destruction of Reason, Adorno and Horkheimer were forced to look back at the irrationalist element which, they argued, had always been present in the Enlightenment dream: they unearthed what they called “The Dialectic of Enlightenment.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 342

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the genesis and core thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment via the encounter with fascist mass manipulation.
• XREF: connects to: Enlightenment’s totalitarianism lies in deciding outcomes before inquiry begins; The Frankfurt School opposed tradition-as-Erfahrung to Enlightenment progress, which destroys it. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 646; The Frankfurt School rejected the totalitarianism-versus-pluralism dichotomy as a false polarity — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 755 (+4 more)