xvi Preface(1944 and 1947) superstition,that system is preparing arid ground for the greedy accep tance of charlatanism and superstition. Just as prohibition has always ensured the admission of the poisonous product, the blocking of the the oretical imagination has paved the way for political delusion. Even when people have not already succumbed to such delusion, they are deprived by the mechanisms of censorship, both the external ones and those implant- ed within them, of the means of resisting it The aporia which faced us in our work thus proved to be the first matter we had to investigate: the self-destruction of enlightenment. We have no doubt--and herein lies our petitio principii--that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking. We believe we have perceived with equal clarity, ho owever at very concept of that think- ing, no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of society with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today. If enlightenment does not assim- ilate reflection on this regressive moment, it seals its own fate. By leaving ration of the destructive side of progress to its enemies, thought in its headlong* rush into pragmatism is forfeiting its sublating character and therefore its relation to truth. In the mysterious willingness of the technologically educated masses to fall under the ell of any despotism in its self-destructive affinity to nationalist paranoia, in all this uncompre- tended senselessness the weakness of contemporary theoretical under- standing is evident We believe that in these fragments we have contributed to such understanding by showing that the cause of enlightenments relapse into mythology is to be sought not so much in the nationalist, pagan, or other modern mythologies concocted specifically to cause such a relapse as in the fear of truth which petrifies enlightenment itself. Both these terms enlightenment and truth, are to be understood as pertaining not merely to ntellectual history but also to current reality. Just as enlightenment ex- presses the real movement of bourgeois society as a whole from the per spective of the idea embodied in its personalities and institutions, truth refers not merely to rational"consciousness but equally to the form it takes in reality. The loyal son of modern civilization's fear of departing from the facts,which even in their perception are turned into cliches by the pre- vailing usages in science, business, and politics, is exactly the same as the fear of social deviation. Those usages also define the concept of clarity in