In 'Negative Dialectic as Fate Adorno and Hegel' in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno J. M Bernstein says that the:
Dialectic of Enlightenment is the attempt to provide a conceptual analysis of how it was possible that the rational process of enlightenment which was intended to secure freedom from fear and human sovereignty could turn into forms of political, social, and cultural domination in which humans are deprived of their individuality and society is generally emptied of human meaning. Horkheimer and Adorno’s goal is thus to elaborate an account of the conceptual underpinnings of the process of societal rationalization (as originally delineated by Max Weber), a process of which capital class domination and reification (as theorized by Marx) constitute the disastrous apotheosis.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s official answer is that instrumental or subjective reasoning, in which items are understood and explained by being subsumed under general theories, is only a part of reason, that part whose job is to enable our coping with and mastering of threatening nature. When this part of reason is taken to be the whole of reason, theoretically and practically, then we end up in the apparently ever-moving but, in reality, static iron cage of modernity.
Bernstein's claim is that:
we understand the dialectic of enlightenment, as taken over from Hegel, as one fundamental expression of the dialectic of desired independence from nature and disavowed dependence: Reason or enlightenment seeks through knowing and labor to master nature and become independent of it without acknowledging its pervasive dependence. The critique of myth is fundamental in this process, as mythic thought represents, however in- adequately, the moment in cognition in which dependence on nature is acknowledged.
In Anticapitalist Readings of Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, György Lukacs, Erich Fromm in Logos Magazine Michael Löwy gives a good description of Max Weber's ambivalence towards capitalism. He says:
Usually he seems to lean towards a resigned acceptance of bourgeois civilization, not as desirable, but as inevitable. However, in some key texts, which had a very significant impact on 20th century thought, he gives free rein to a insightful, pessimistic and radical critique of the paradoxes of capitalist rationality. Obviously, the issues raised by Weber are quite different from those of Marx. Weber ignores exploitation, is not interested in economic crisis, has little sympathy for the struggles of the proletariat, and does not question colonial expansion. However, influenced by the Romantic or Nietzschean Kulturpessimismus, he perceives a deep contradiction between the requirements of the formal modern rationality — of which bureaucracy and private enterprise are concrete manifestations — and those of the acting subject’s autonomy.
Distancing himself from Enlightenment’s rationalist tradition, he is sensitive to the contradictions and limits of modern rationality, as it expresses itself in capitalist economy and state administration: its formal and instrumental character and its tendency to produce effects that lead to the reversal of the emancipatory aspirations of modernity. The search for calculation and efficiency at any price leads to the bureaucratization and reification of human activities. This diagnosis of modernity’s crisis will be, to a large extent, taken over by the Frankfurt School in its first period (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse).
In Neo-Cons and the Counter-Enlightenment at Logos Journal Philip Green characterizes American conservatism as the counter Enlightenment. He says that in the US the political institutions of liberalism are virtually unchallengeable—and have not really been challenged by the new conservatism—this comes mostly as a rebellion in the realm of culture.
This neo-conservatism, he states, hasn’t replaced classical American liberalism but it contends for power with it. Green characterizes American conservatism as the counter Enlightenment. He says:
At the root of neo-conservatism is the naked power approach to politics, heralded by the ex-Trotskyite James Burnham in his influential book The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, shortly after WWII. Burnham and his followers at first produced a political theory and eventually a political practice of what are, supposedly, competing elitisms: the conservative elitism of say Mosca, Michels, and Pareto against the radical elitism of Lenin, Gramsci, Marcuse, Althusser et al. In either case, the so-called “people” are, according to this theory’s proponents, necessarily excluded from any real say in political life. The theory became practice especially in the work and activism of Irving Kristol, the godfather of neo-conservatism, who in the 1970s in an influential essay—perhaps the most influential essay written in the 20th century United States—addressed corporate leaders and foundation heads on the necessity of taking steps to defend capitalism against the Left by explicitly funding right-wing theorizing and activism.
The first is creationism. The importance of this phenomenon can hardly be over-emphasized. It sweeps throughout the blue states, where in many communities overwhelming majorities reject biological science tout court; and even some of the red ones. The basis of creationism is either Biblical literalism or, worse, a wholly fraudulent “biology” known as Intelligent Design, masquerading as science in order to replace it.....The second example, of course, is the gay marriage hysteria. Here the materialism and rationalism of modern thought run entirely aground.....Every negative comment about gay marriage rests itself on the same foundation, that our civilization is “at stake.” No one is able to verbalize in the slightest how this might be so. Strengthening marriage symbolically apparently destroys it; more people undergoing the ritual of marriage apparently destroys it; two people affirming their commitment without benefit of a formal legal licensing process can be compared to looting, rioting, bestiality, and polyandry.
Will Hutton's Them and Us: Changing Britain – Why We Need a Fair Society argues for accepting justice as desert. People are deserving or undeserving as in people deserve to be rewarded for their effort,
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in its entry on desert says that:
The concept of desert is deeply entrenched in everyday morality. We say that effort deserves success, wrongdoing deserves punishment, innocent suffering deserves sympathy or compensation, virtue deserves happiness, and so on. We think that the getting of what's deserved is just, and that failure to receive what's deserved is unjust. We also believe it's good that a person gets what she deserves, and bad that she doesn't—even if she deserves something bad, like punishment. We assume, too, that it's wrong to treat people better or worse than they deserve, and right to treat them according to their deserts. In these and other ways, the notion of desert pervades our ethical lives.
In 'Negative Dialectic as Fate Adorno and Hegel' in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno J. M Bernstein address the idea of dialectics at a standstill and the category of non-identity.
The former is understood thus:
Instrumental reasoning, as the rational expression of and means for securing the desire for self-preservation, misrecognizes itself when it reifies the process of abstraction through which it proceeds, when it comes, finally, to think of itself as reason as such. In so doing, it separates itself from anthropomorphic nature, conceiving itself as independent and separate, and nature as its alien other – an other whose shape, as a system of objects governed by mechan- ical laws, shares nothing with it. In denying the anthropomorphic life of its other, it liquidates its own life; reification is literal and not metaphorical. Finally, what it suffers in terms of fate, now the debilitating consequences of rationalized modernity, our iron cage, is still the “reactive force of a life that has been suppressed and separated off.
The concept of non-identity provides the answer. Bernstein says that:
Dialectics can commence only by understanding the dominant logical mechanism of reason from a reverse angle. Under standard conditions, contradictions are signs that reason has failed and hence a spur to seek a better, more consistent, and more unifying account. But if the unity and so consistency of the phenomena facing us is the problem, a sign that we have imposed an order on it, then the emergence of a contradiction signifies differently; it means that some- thing has slipped through the unifying net, which is to say that contradictions testify to antagonisms in reality (between what is demanded of things and the things). What slips past the unifying net is nonidentical with the concept that was supposed to grasp it.
Negative dialectics, austerely thought, is nothing other than the reflective version of the experience of contradiction; it is that experience raised to the level of the concept. What makes this dialectic negative is that it nowhere claims or even attempts to state the truth of an indigent item; rather it is riveted to the moment in which the object appears as “more” than what its covering concept has claimed it is.
Dialectics is the reflective comprehension of the experience of contradiction; contradiction now occurs because there is an antagonism between the social system, rationalized society as formed through the demands of capital, and the particular subjects and objects formed. Contradiction, when it occurs, points to the claim of the particular, the nonidentical, against its social identifications. Since contradiction is the moving force of negative dialectics, negative dialectics will continue only so long as domination continues.
In his Browne’s Gamble in the London Review of Books Stefan Collini reviews Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education: An Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance by Lord Browne et al. Collini says:
Essentially, Browne is contending that we should no longer think of higher education as the provision of a public good, articulated through educational judgment and largely financed by public funds (in recent years supplemented by a relatively small fee element). Instead, we should think of it as a lightly regulated market in which consumer demand, in the form of student choice, is sovereign in determining what is offered by service providers (i.e. universities).
Instead, Browne wants to see universities attracting customers in a competitive marketplace: there will be a certain amount of public subsidy of these consumers’ purchasing power, especially for those who do not go on to a reasonably well-paid job, but the mechanism which would henceforth largely determine what and how universities teach, and indeed in some cases whether they exist at all, will be consumer choice.
Collini says that this report displays no real interest in universities as places of education; they are conceived of simply as engines of economic prosperity and as agencies for equipping future employees to earn higher salaries. He adds that what is at stake is whether universities in the future are to be thought of as having a public cultural role partly sustained by public support, or whether we move further towards redefining them in terms of a purely economistic calculation of value and a wholly individualist conception of ‘consumer satisfaction’.