xviii Preface(r944 and 1947) of culture did not contribute to converting economic achievements into their opposite. Under the given circumstances the gifts of fortune themselves ecome elements of misfortune If, in the absence of the social subject, the volume of goods took the form of so-called overproduction in domestic economic crises in the preceding period, today, thanks to the enthrone ment of powerful groups as that social subject, it is producing the inter- national threat of fascism: progress is reverting to regression. That the hygienic factory and everything pertaining to it, Volkswagen and the sports palace, are obtusely liquidating metaphysics does not matter in itself, but that these things are themselves becoming metaphysics, an ide ological curtain 'within the social whole, behind which real doom is gath ering, does matter. That is the basic premise of our fragments The first essay, the theoretical basis of those which follow, seeks to gain greater understanding of the intertwinement of rationality and social reality, as well as of the intertwinement, inseparable from the former, of nature and the mastery of nature. The critique of enlightenment given in this section is intended to prepare a positive concept of enlightenment which liberates it from its entanglement in blind domination The critical part of the first essay can be broadly summed up in two theses: Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to my- thology. These theses are worked out in relation to specific subjects in the two excurses. The first traces the dialectic of myth and enlightenment in the Odyssey, as one of the earliest representative documents of bourgeoi Western civilization. It focuses primarily on the concepts of sacrifice and renunciation,through which both the difference between and the unity of mythical nature and enlightened mastery of nature become apparent. The second excursus is concerned with Kant, Sade, and Nietzsche, whose works represent the implacable consummation of enlightenment. This section shows how the subjugation of everything natural to the sovereign subject culminates in the domination of what is blindly objective and nat ural. This tendency levels all the antitheses of bourgeois thought, espe cially that between moral rigor and absolute amorality The section"The Culture Industry"shows the regression of enlight enment to ideology which is graphically expressed in film and radio. Here, enlightenment consists primarily in the calculation of effects and in the echnology of production and dissemination; the specific content of the