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Karl Marx: The Ideology Of Bourgeois Society

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For Karl Marx the enlightenment represents the ideology of bourgeois society.“The thoughts of the dominant class are in every epoch the dominant ideas, i.e. the class which is the dominant material power of society is also the dominant spiritual power. The dominant thoughts are not anything other than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, material relations are the dominant form of ideas before, so the reports that are words from one class the ruling class, ie what are the ideas of its dominance.” ~ Karl Marx*(1)

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, associated with The Frankfurt school*(2) of philosophers that emerged from the Nazi State in the mid twentieth century followed some of Marxist theory but perceived omissions …show more content…

Horkhiemer and Adorno were led to the consideration of the enlightenment as myth, how it started with the aim of getting rid of myth, then became a myth."Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labour of others ...What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts." ~ Horkheimer and …show more content…

The thoughtful person is subsumed with rational procedures. He claimed that Marx's immiseration of workers is wrong as he didn't allow for improvement in their conditions. "Marx did not see justice and freedom are dialectical concepts ... the more freedom, the less justice, and the more justice, the less freedom. The critical theory which I concieved later is based on the idea that one cannot determine what is good, what a good, a free society would look like from within the society we now live in. We lack the means. But in our work we can bring up the negative aspects of this society which we want to change." ~ Adorno

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