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Eclipse of Reason is a 1947 book by Max Horkheimer, a German philosopher and sociologist who was a key figure in the Frankfurt School of critical theory.In the book, Horkheimer argues that in modernity the concept of reason has been reduced to a mere instrument for achieving practical goals, rather than a means of understanding objective truth.
Critical theory is a social, historical, and political school of thought and philosophical perspective which centers on analyzing and challenging systemic power relations in society, arguing that knowledge, truth, and social structures are fundamentally shaped by power dynamics between dominant and oppressed groups. [1]
Horkheimer opposed critical theory to traditional theory, wherein the word theory is applied in the positivistic sense of scientism, in the sense of a purely observational mode, which finds and establishes scientific law (generalizations) about the real world. Social sciences differ from natural sciences because their scientific generalizations ...
Because subjective/instrumental reason rules, the ideals of a society, for example democratic ideals, become dependent on the "interests" of the people instead of being dependent on objective truths. Horkheimer writes, "Social power is today more than ever mediated by power over things.
The term culture industry (German: Kulturindustrie) was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", [1] of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), wherein they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing ...
Such "immutable economic laws" are what Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867) revealed about the functioning of the capitalist mode of production, how goods and services (commodities) are circulated among a society; and thus explain the psychological phenomenon of commodity fetishism, which ascribes an independent, objective value and ...
On this reading, reification entails a stance that separates the subject from the objective world, creating a mistaken relation between subject and object that is reduced to disengaged knowing. Applied to the social world, this leaves individual subjects feeling that society is something they can only know as an alien power, rather than ...
Simple examples of social constructs are the meaning of words, the value of paper money, and the rules of economic systems. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] Other examples, such as race , were formerly considered controversial but are now accepted by the consensus of scientists to be socially constructed rather than naturally determined.