A Road Not Taken: Critical Theory after Dialectic of Enlightenment

Where Marcuse and the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment decisively part company is not on the negative side of materialism, in its concern with suffering, but on the positive side, in its affirmation of the demand for happiness. For Adorno and Horkheimer, after Dialectic of Enlightenment, reconciliation merely means the absence of suffering, as is evident for instance in Adorno’s claim that after Auschwitz, progress reduces to the demand “that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture”. By contrast, Marcuse frames his entire critical activity in terms of a reactivation of the promise of equality, liberty and happiness that is enunciated by the French Enlightenment and enacted by the French Revolution. For Marcuse, the “demand for happiness” that is expressed in the artwork is to be actualised through a revolutionary politics, in a programme that redeems the promise of the bourgeois ideals whose realization capitalist society blocks, by means of participatory democracy, egalitarian redistribution, cultural tolerance and the restructuring of the instincts through non-repressive de-sublimation. This is the author-accepted manuscript (AAM) of:Geoff Boucher, “A Road Not Taken: Critical Theory after Dialectic of Enlightenment,” in Martyn Henry Lloyd and Geoff Boucher (eds), Rethinking the Enlightenment (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2017), pp. 221–245.The AAM is deposited with permission under the publisher’s self-archiving policy.Please cite the published version: https://dro.deakin.edu.au/articles/chapter/A_road_not_taken_critical_theory_after_Dialectic_of_enlightenment/20824342