Abstract

The thesis concerning the totalitarian character of the Enlightenment was originally articulated, if only briefly, during the heyday of the California exile of the Institute for Social Research, then suddenly dropped. Dialectic of Enlightenment was never completed and it was around that time, the mid-1940s, that Critical Theory went into its notorious theoretical hibernation. As Nancy Jachec shows in “Adorno, Greenberg and Modernist Politics,” the next two decades were wasted on forays into aesthetics, psychoanalysis and opportunistic liberal apologetics such as The Authoritarian Personality — nothing radically different from what run-of-the-mill liberal ideologues such as Clement Greenberg were also doing