For a proposed preface to a new edition of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno writes a letter to Horkheimer, and says:
‘One experience has not been anticipated in the book, although it is hinted at in other texts of ours: at least our young people have set out to resist the transition to the totally administered world that is not being brought into being seamlessly, but by means of dictatorships and wars. The protest movement in all the countries of the world, in both blocs as well as the third world, testifies to the fact that wholesale integration does not necessarily proceed smoothly. If this book assists the cause of resistance to achieve a consciousness that illuminates and that prevents people from submitting to blind practice out of despair and from succumbing to collective narcism, that would give it a genuine function’
Quoted in Detlev Claussen
