ism, represented something new in history. ^* Horkheimer's formulation of the issue left no room for such a distinction. It assimilated modern racism to "ancient" tribalism and implicitly endorsed a theory of cultural lag quite inconsistent with the dialectical way of thinking advanced in other works by Horkheimer and Adorno, including works composed in the very same decade that gave birth to The Authoritarian Personality and the other Studies in Prejudice. In Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason (1944) and their collaborative Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Horkheimer and Adorno argued that "enlightenment" was part of the problem, not its solution. Although the Enlightenment liberated mankind from superstition and subservience to authority, it dissolved any awareness of the natural limits on human powers. It gave rise to the dangerous fantasy that man could remodel both the natural world and human nature itself. Enlightenment transformed moral philosophy into social engineering, thus making it impossible for critical thought to serve as "mankind's memory and conscience," in Horkheimer's telling phrase.

The Eclipse of Reason disclaimed any intention to provide a "program of action." Moral philosophy, Horkheimer argued, "must not be turned into

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Compare the more compelling interpretation of modern racism offered by Hannah Arendt in her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). According to Arendt, racism took shape in the context of imperialism and the "atmosphere of rootlessness" it generated. The myth of imperial grandeur and racial destiny appealed to "superfluous men" who "had not the slightest idea of the meaning of patria and patriotism, nor the vaguest notion of responsibility for a common, limited community." The rise of racism and imperialism coincided with the abandonment of a political conception of equality that grounded civil rights not in nature but in an "equality of human purpose." Whereas an older political theory took the position that citizenship conferred equality on individuals otherwise unequal by birth and circumstances, modern nationalism made equality a precondition rather than a product of citizenship. "Nineteenth-century positivism and progressivism perverted [the] purpose of human equality when they set out to demonstrate what cannot be demonstrated, namely, that men are equal by nature and different only by history and circumstances, so that they can be equalized not by rights, but by circumstances and education." When education and social reform failed to produce homogeneous communities, the more drastic policy of racial purity commended itself, to rootless men and women who "could discover no higher value than themselves," as the only alternative to cultural "decadence." Instead of basing her interpretation on psychological speculation, Arendt tried to put the phenomenon of racism in its historical context.

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