SOURCE: Alway, Joan. “Horkheimer and Adorno: Despair and Possibility in a Time of Eclipse.” In Critical Theory and Political Possibilities: Conceptions of Emancipatory Politics in the Works of Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas, pp. 49-70. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Alway contrasts Horkheimer and Adorno's attitude toward social change, focusing on their response to and appropriation of Marxist thought.

When optimism is shattered in periods of crushing defeat, many intellectuals risk falling into a pessimism about society and a nihilism which are just as ungrounded as their exaggerated optimism had been. They cannot bear the thought that the kind of thinking which is most topical, which has the deepest grasp of the historical situation, and is most pregnant with the future, must at certain times isolate its subject and throw him back upon himself.

—Max Horkheimer “Traditional and Critical Theory,” 214

Dialectic of Enlightenment is an...