Espen Hammer

Composed whilst in exile in the United States during the Second World War, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is the most famous and influential text of the Frankfurt School. A theoretical exploration of history, modernity, and culture, its core warning of crisis and regression remains highly relevant today. However, it is also a notoriously complex work of philosophy. The Routledge Guidebook to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is the first fully contextualized introduction to this foundational text in philosophy and social theory, addressing its central themes, reception, and influence. This Guidebook examines:The conceptual and intellectual background to Dialectic of Enlightenment. The ideas, themes, and arguments of the text. The reception and legacy of Dialectic of Enlightenment. A comprehensive and clearly written guide to this important text, The Routledge Guidebook to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment will be invaluable to students coming to the work for the first time, as well as more advanced students and researchers in philosophy, politics, sociology, and the history of ideas.

A fresh history of nineteenth-century philosophy’s many ideas about secularization.   The secularization thesis, which held that religious belief would gradually yield to rationality, has been thoroughly debunked. What, then, can we learn from philosophers for whom the death of God seemed so imminent? In this book, Espen Hammer offers a sweeping analysis of secularization in nineteenth-century German philosophy, arguing that the persistence of religion (rather than its absence) animated this tradition. Hammer shows that Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche, each in their own way, sought to preserve and transform religion’s ethical and communal aspirations for modern life. A renewed appreciation for this tradition’s generous thought, Hammer argues, can help us chart a path through needlessly destructive conflicts between secularists and fundamentalists today.