Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno famously argued that ‘myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.’ Although much scholarship has analyzed and built upon Horkheimer and Adorno’s insight, it has often conflated myth with another concept: epic. By closely reading Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, this article disentangles the two concepts and elucidates key features of myth. Sacrifice, it argues, stood at the centre of myth, connecting and organizing its other dimensions. Next, the article reconstructs the lineage (...) of Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of myth and sacrifice in the fields of anthropology, ethnology, and sociology. Specifically, Horkheimer and Adorno drew on analyses of sacrificial rites in these disciplines to argue that sacrifices constituted a transaction between worshipers and gods and, therefore, established control, disempowerment, and fraud. Finally, the article takes up Horkheimer and Adorno’s task of tracing the conduits between myth and enlightenment by identifying parallel features of sacrifice and modern wage labor. To conclude, the article indicates the significance of mythical sacrifice by connecting its analysis of wage labour to contemporary theorizing about the ‘theological dimensions of capitalism.’ Together, these arguments show the centrality of Dialectic to theories of myth as conceptual tools and critical resources. (shrink)

I argue that populism is not the cause of the erosion of diversity capital in contemporary democracies, it is its outcome. Focusing on the process of politicization of the social grievances articulated by populist parties and movements, I offer a diagnosis of the state of the political in contemporary democracies, in order to discern populism’s capacity to reboot democratic politics.

Using the temperate nature of recent social protest as its entry point, this analysis investigates the current state of liberal democracies as one in which the purported crisis of capitalism has en...

The critical theory of the Frankfurt School starts with an explanatory-diagnostic analysis of the social pathologies of the present followed by anticipatory-utopian reflection on possible treatments for these disorders. This approach draws extensively on parallels to medicine. I argue that the ideas of social pathology and crisis that pervade the methodological writings of the Frankfurt School help to explain critical theory’s contention that the object of critique identifies itself when social institutions cease to function smoothly. However, in reflecting on the (...) role that reason and self-awareness play in the second stage of social criticism, I contend that this model is actually better conceptualized through the lens of the psychoanalyst rather than the physician. Although the first generation’s explicit commitment to psychoanalysis has dissipated in recent critical theory, faith in a rationalized ‘talking cure’ leading to greater self-awareness of existing pathologies remains at the core of the Frankfurt School. (shrink)