Page "Theodor W. Adorno" Paragraph 17

In November 1941 Adorno followed Horkheimer to what Thomas Mann called " German California ," setting up house in a Pacific Palisades neighborhood of German emigres which included Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Schoenberg.

Adorno arrived with a draft of his Philosophy of New Music, a dialectical critique of twelve-tone music, which Adorno himself felt, while writing, was already a departure from the theory of art he had spent the previous decades elaborating.

Horkheimer's reaction to the manuscript was wholly positive: " If I have ever in the whole of my life felt enthusiasm about anything, then I did on this occasion ," he wrote after reading the manuscript.

The two set about completing their joint work, which transformed itself from a book on dialectical logic to a rewriting of the history of rationality and the Enlightenment.

First published in a small mimeographed edition in May 1944 as Philosophical Fragments, the text would wait another three years before achieving book form when it was published with its definitive title, Dialectic of Enlightenment, by the Amsterdam publisher Querido Verlag.

This " reflection on the destructive aspect of progress " proceeded through chapter which treated rationality as both the liberation from and further domination of nature, interpretations of both Homer ’ s Odyssey and the Marquis de Sade, as well as analyses of the culture industry and anti-semitism.