Enlightenment and Repression: A Comparison of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper offers a comparison of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. It is my contention that although the content of these two works differs, there is an underlying argument which is remarkably similar. Drawing mainly on the early chapters of Dialectic and the first half of Eros, I plan to demonstrate that each text explores, the intertwining and cyclical nature of progress and regression; the manner in which liberating tendencies emerge which challenge present conditions, but upon their ascension become a new form of repression; for Horkheimer and Adorno this is the development of subjectivity in the movement from myth to enlightenment, which becomes the new myth; for Marcuse, it is the instinctual repression, under the guise of ‘civilization’, required of individuals in the interest of self-preservation and propagation. Furthermore, in both cases neither enlightenment, nor the reality principle are ever fully victorious, hence this cycle is self-perpetuating.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".