CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

Again, the theory of Dialektik der Aufklärung is interpreted as claiming to find the
single, deepest principle of historical development in the relation of humanity to inner
and outer nature, and locating the root of social pathology today in the development of
this relation as one of ever-intensifying domination. But if the conflict with nature is the
single and universal ultimate “motor of history,” then the development of civilization
could not but be the development of domination, and, once again, the pathological state
of advanced capitalist Western society is seen as a necessary consequence of history.
Seyla Benhabib, influenced by Habermas, follows the same line of interpretation.
She claims that the Dialektik der Aufklärung signals a transition to a form of critique that
becomes “totalizing” because it reduces all social labor—that is, the very building block
of any society at all—to the domination of nature. 259 In this reading, Adorno and
Horkheimer’s conception of history is interpreted as a negative teleology: a steady,
uninterrupted, and necessary progression toward the pathology and barbarism of the
present. Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of enlightenment, Benhabib says, entails that
“it is exactly the continuum of history that critique must reject.” 260 The socio-historical
realm is to be condemned in its essence. Benhabib’s view is that the account of Dialektik
der Aufklärung entails that the devolution of human society to brute domination is
166-7.
259 Benhabib, Seyla, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986),
260 See ibid., 179, where Benhabib writes:
But if it is exactly the continuum of history that critique must reject, then the vision of the
emancipated society which it articulates becomes a privileged mystery that cannot be related to the
immanent self-understanding of needs and conflicts arising from within the continuum of the
historical process. Critical theory must either revise the one-dimensionality thesis or it must
question its own very possibility. This was recognized by Claus Offe in 1968: critical theory
‘must either limit the argument concerning all-encompassing manipulation and must admit the
presence of structural leaks within the system of repressive rationality, or it must renounce the
claim to be able to explain the conditions of its own possibility’.
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