T. W. Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment is fifty years old. Its disconcerting darkness now seems so bound to the time of its writing, one may well wonder if we have anything to learn from it. Are its main lines of argument relevant to our social and philosophical world? Are the losses it records losses we can still recognise as our own?

Let me begin my re-evaluation indirectly, by citing a passage from Adorno's Minima Moralia, a book of aphoristic fragments whose composition overlapped in part with the writing of Dialectic of Enlightenment. The subtitle of Minima Moralia is Reflections from Damaged Life; one can thus consider its fragmentary form a consequence of the fact that our ethical life is somehow damaged, damaged in such a way that the traditional work of the philosopher, teaching what the good life for man should be, is no longer possible – a thesis which has become part of our present philosophical culture through the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre and Bernard Williams. Adorno's take on this situation is significantly different from theirs. Speaking of the man who ‘conforms his reactions to social reality’, rather than myopically attuning them to private existence, Adorno says:

Where civilisation as self-preservation does not force on him civilisation as humanity, he gives free rein to his fury against the latter, and refutes his own ideology of home, family and community.