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The Mundane Dialectic of Enlightenment: Typification as Everyday Identity Thinking Ryan Gunderson1  Accepted: 7 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract To make Adorno’s difficult notion of “identity thinking” more amendable to sociological research, this project brings his Negative Dialectics into conversation with Schutz’s theory of typification. When revised with Adorno’s attention to political economy and the pathologies of reification, Schutz’s framework allows for an analysis of identity thinking in everyday life. Both theorists argue that categories of thought: (1) automatically subsume objects for pragmatic yet socially conditioned reasons, (2) are socially formed, transferred, and selected, and (3) suppress particularizing characteristics of objects. Their overlapping arguments are cross-fertilized to propose a critical approach to cognitive sociology that can engage in a form of ideology critique that illuminates forms of thinking that conceal social contradictions. This approach is useful for explaining the “mundane dialectic of enlightenment”: the daily reproduction of unreflective rationalization that breeds irrationality in the form of social domination and environmental harm, a contradiction which finds its ultimate expression in climate change inaction. Keywords  Schutz · Adorno · Phenomenology · Critical theory · Cognitive sociology · Ideology · Negative dialectics

Introduction In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno (1969: 16) counterintuitively argue that “myth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology”. By “enlightenment,” the Frankfurt School meant the secularization and disenchantment of non-rational (“mythical, religious, or magical”) worldviews (Jarvis 1998: 24), a tendency underlying all human history, not just during the Enlightenment (Stone 2008: 50). “Myth is already enlightenment” because myth is not merely * Ryan Gunderson [email protected] 1



Department of Sociology and Gerontology, Miami University, 375 Upham Hall, Oxford, OH 45056, USA

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mythical, it is a form of reason itself that classifies aspects of the world for control. “Enlightenment reverts to mythology” because, through the rationalization process, (1) reason aborts its promise to rationally formulate ends, and (2) means, such as economic production, become ends themselves (see Horkheimer 1947). The quest to master nature to control it for human aims has brought about a paradoxical outcome: humanity extends the control of nature to “inner nature” and society. Dialectic of Enlightenment was a forerunner of Adorno’s masterpiece, Negative Dialectics (1973), where he formulates his mature theory of “identity” or “identitarian” thinking, or, “identification,” a form of cognition earlier investigated in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Broadly, identity thinking means “the subsuming of single events or objects under general concepts” (Brunkhorst 1999: 1). In his history of the Frankfurt School, Wiggershaus (1995: 604) points out two surprising ch