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During the 1930s a group of unorthodox leftist scholars at the University of Frankfort in Germany, known as the "Frankfurt School", began asking how Western civilisation, with its roots in humanistic culture and the Enlightenment, could have given rise to German fascism.

The conclusions of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were only published after the second world war, in "Dialectic of Enlightenment." They proposed that Enlightenment thought contained the seeds of its own self-destruction, in the form of a split between human subjectivity and natural forces, the former dominating the latter, to the point of finally turning against itself. The Frankfort School thus formulated an explicit critique of scientific rationality, which in being raised to the status of myth, becomes irrational.

==References==
*Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, "Dialectic of Enlightenment" (1947)

==Links==
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School

[[Category:Historical Roots]]