Can reason become a tool of domination?

A service that keeps getting better

Imagine a public housing repair office that promises every resident a home kept in good repair. A new performance measure counts the requests each worker closes, and managers reward short calls and quick closure. A resident whose ceiling still leaks is told to submit another form. Her request is closed, the figures improve, and the bucket stays on the floor.

The office is getting better at meeting its target. Is it getting better at its job?

That question leads into Max Horkheimer’s criticism of instrumental reason. Beauvoir’s account of situated freedom asked what conditions let people pursue their projects; Horkheimer asks how an institution’s way of thinking can put its own purposes beyond question.

Which question does the calculation answer?

Instrumental reason selects effective means to a given end. In the opening of Eclipse of Reason, Horkheimer calls reason “subjective” when it judges purposes chiefly by their service to self-preservation, rather than asking whether they deserve to be pursued. He contrasts it with “objective reason,” which sought standards for ends within an account of reality as a whole. “Subjective” here does not mean careless personal opinion: a calculation can be exact while the purpose it serves goes unquestioned. [1]

At the repair office, arranging visits to reduce wasted travel is instrumental reasoning. That can help residents. Trouble begins when every question must take this form, so that staff may ask how to close more requests but not why closure should count as success when repairs remain undone.

Even perfectly accurate closure figures would leave the choice of target open to criticism. Efficiency tells us how well an arrangement reaches a goal; it cannot, by itself, justify the goal.

A historical criticism of progress

Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno belonged to the first generation of the Frankfurt School, the thinkers associated with the Institute for Social Research, which Nazism forced into exile. They drew on Marx while reworking his ideas, asking why greater knowledge and productive power could coexist with severe domination. Critical theory, in this tradition, examines how society is organized, with a view to understanding and overcoming such domination. [3] [4]

Their jointly written Dialectic of Enlightenment opens with a disturbing reversal: the effort to free people from fear can produce new powers over them. In the selected chapter, they describe a society that makes different things comparable by reducing them to quantities, so that whatever does not fit the calculation risks disappearing from consideration. [2]

The repair office shows that concern on a small scale. A complicated leak and a request for a replacement handle each become one case to close, and the common unit hides differences that matter to residents. This example does not prove the authors’ sweeping account of Western history, but it lets us examine one of its arguments.

When a procedure acquires authority

Rationalization here means organizing activity through systematic rules, calculation and control. A repair schedule can reduce neglect. But suppose workers lose the discretion to keep a difficult request open, and residents have no effective way to contest a closure. Their accounts of what remains broken are then treated as interference with a process already pronounced successful.

The procedure gives managers power over workers and residents while making that power hard to challenge. Domination need not depend on a manager who enjoys cruelty: staff may fear poor ratings, and managers may fear losing their budget. People learn to serve the measure, although the office exists to serve residents.

Marx’s workshop distinguished personal attitudes from structural relations: who controls work, and what others must depend on. More sympathetic staff might improve a call without changing the incentives or the residents’ ability to challenge a decision. The question concerns how the service is organized, as well as the character of the people who work in it.

Criticism from within

Immanent critique begins within an institution’s own claims and practices, asking how they conflict and what the conflict reveals. It needs no finished blueprint for a perfect society. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the thinking that sustains an institution must itself be open to criticism. [2] [4]

Residents can begin with the office’s own promise: homes kept in good repair. If unresolved leaks count as successful service, the procedure frustrates that promise. The criticism also explains how the failure is reproduced, since workers are rewarded for closing requests even when the problem remains.

The inquiry may change how the promise itself is understood. Suppose the office calls an identical short call for everyone “equal service.” Some residents need longer to explain a problem, and some faults need inspection, so equal concern may require different amounts of time. Immanent critique can revise an institution’s standards as well as its conduct; it need not treat the current wording of those standards as final. [5]

Residents would still need evidence about repeat requests, completed repairs and the constraints on staff, and identifying the conflict does not tell them which remedy will work. If the office abandoned every worthwhile commitment, this appeal to its promise would lose its force, and criticism would need further arguments about suffering, power and what institutions owe people.

Keeping reason available for criticism

The selected chapter explicitly distinguishes its objection from hostility to analysis, and it keeps open the possibility that knowledge could undo domination. [2] Critics nevertheless ask whether its sweeping diagnosis leaves enough room for rational resistance. [4] At the repair office, abandoning evidence would only make the leaking ceiling easier to ignore.

Residents might propose that success include completed repairs, reasons for delays and a way to challenge a closure, and they would need to assess the costs and results. Fallibilism, the willingness to correct beliefs and methods, helps explain why an improved procedure must stay open to revision. This is a connection between lessons, not a claim that Horkheimer agreed with the pragmatists; his selected text criticizes pragmatism.

Nor did the Frankfurt School speak with one voice. Horkheimer wrote Eclipse of Reason, while Dialectic of Enlightenment was a collaboration. Adorno’s culture industry criticism examines how commercial production standardizes entertainment and encourages conformity. That is a disputed account of how culture operates, not a verdict on the worth of everyone’s enjoyment, and audiences’ responses and possibilities of resistance also need examination. [5]

A later generation, represented by Jürgen Habermas, placed greater emphasis on reasoning through communication and mutual understanding. The differences matter: “critical theory” names a developing conversation, not one unchanged doctrine. [3]

Try the criticism

A manager says, “Our closure figures are correct, so the service is rational.” A resident replies, “Then we should stop counting things altogether.” Explain why neither conclusion follows. Use the office’s promise to develop an immanent criticism, and identify something that would need investigation. This exercise is optional.

Read a possible response

The manager’s conclusion does not follow, because accurate figures answer a narrower question. Accurate closure figures establish how many requests were closed. They do not establish how many homes were repaired or whether the chosen goal deserves priority, and instrumental reasoning can improve scheduling while leaving that question untouched. An immanent criticism begins with the office’s own promise: rewarding closure while leaks remain defeats the purpose of the service. If equal service means identical short calls, the criticism may also require rethinking equality in light of differing needs.

The resident’s conclusion fails in the other direction. What needs investigating is whether homes are actually being repaired, and counting completed repairs and repeated requests could test that; staff accounts and residents’ experiences would help explain what the numbers miss. Abandoning all measurement would remove useful evidence; treating one measure as the whole meaning of success would conceal relevant evidence. A useful reform must reconsider what counts as success and test whether the changes help residents. The case does not show that every rule is oppressive, or supply a complete plan for a housing service.

Carry this forward

Ask what a procedure achieves, who chose that aim and what it prevents people from questioning. Understanding is not reading without assumptions turns to another condition of inquiry: what we bring with us when we try to understand a text.

Sources and limits

[1] Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, “Means and Ends”, in the German Historical Institute’s German History Intersections, for subjective and objective reason. Read its complete displayed selection and notes 1–7, reprinted by permission from Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, pages 1–5, 13–15 and 18–19. The book was first published in English in 1947. Its opening establishes the means–ends distinction. Marked omissions remain, and its judgments about other philosophers are not independently established here.

[2] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” in Richard Kearney and Mara Rainwater, eds., The Continental Philosophy Reader, Routledge, 1996, pages 199–211, including notes 1–15, for enlightenment, calculation and domination. Read this complete, abridged anthology selection. The acknowledgments credit John Cumming’s translation of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso/New Left Books, 1979.

• Domination and calculation: pages 199–200.
• The criticism distinguished from hostility to analysis: page 204.
• Administration and the possibility of resistance: pages 206–208.
• Thought’s critical purpose: pages 210–211.

The omitted passages, original German and other translations were not read.

[3] Kearney and Rainwater, editorial introductions in the same anthology, pages 194–198 and 235–237, read completely, including their bibliographies, for context on the first generation and on Habermas. Some biographical details conflict with the scholarship below and are not used for a detailed chronology. Source 5 qualifies the account of popular culture. No Habermas primary text was read.

[4] J. C. Berendzen, “Max Horkheimer”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, revised 18 July 2022, for changes in Horkheimer’s project and the disputed possibility of rational criticism. Read the complete main text of §3, the opening of §4, §4.1 and §4.3. Linked notes and cited works were not separately read.

[5] Henry Pickford and Lambert Zuidervaart, “Theodor W. Adorno”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, November 2024 update, for immanent criticism and qualifications of the culture-industry argument. Read the opening of §4 and the complete §4.2, plus the final paragraph of §4.1 and the first paragraph of §7.2. Cited works were not separately read.

Sources consulted 18 September 2026. Selected anthology page images were checked against extracted text. No whole book or original-language comparison was undertaken. The repair office, residents, measures and reform proposals are original teaching material, and this bounded example leaves the wider historical diagnosis open to challenge. No independent scholarly review or learner testing is claimed.