1. The essay works by means of what Weber calls an “elective affinity” between the structure of Puritan ideas (above all, of the Calvinist variant) and the structure of the rationalization of capital accumulation necessary to the development of capitalism. That is, it opposes any notion that economic change directly provides the content of capitalist ideas. Instead, it suggests that what is important is the “homology” between what capitalism needed in order to become a sanctioned system of regulated economic activity, and the impulse to planned and routinized “activity” in Puritanism. It adds to this a middle, mediating term: the Puritan/capitalist “character structure.” It is worth noting that the move from content to “homologies of structures” is the key theoretical advance represented in Goldmann’s Hidden God : and that the attention to “character structure” is an aspect to which both the “Frankfurt School” and Wilhelm Reich were, later, to pay considerable attention. 17 This approach, though radically departing from a Marxist theory of ideology, does not contest Marx’s proposition (in The German Ideology ) that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”: it suggests, rather, one way in which, historically, this may have come about.

“Irrationalism” constitutes the second line of descent. The “struggle over method” had polarized into two main camps—positivism and historicism. But historicism was itself a fusion of many different strands. It included German Romanticism, which had never been fully tamed by the efforts of figures like Dilthey to make the study of Objective Mind (the “beyond of Science”) orderly and, in its own way, “scientific.” Mannheim’s study of German “Conservative Thought” brings out clearly its irrationalist roots. And at the end of the century, this impulse surfaced again in European thought—this time in the form of Vitalism. For Nietzsche, who made himself its most forceful spokesman, there was no guiding philosophy or method left at all. There was only the general debunking of all ideas, and their savage reduction to the sordid interests masked within their high-flown generalities. “We live,” Nietzsche asserted, “only through illusions … the foundations of everything great and alive rest upon illusion. The pathos of truth leads to destruction.” 19 Nietzsche believed that the contradiction inside the notion of ideology had at last been dismantled: Reason was a ruse: all that was left was the naked power-struggle between illusions, between interests. The most successful illusion was that which evinced the greatest “will to power.” We know what Hitler and the skilled masters of illusion who gathered around him in the 1930s did with that idea. They translated Nietzsche’s fantasy into reality: they set about constructing a G ö tzend ä mmerung . When the Frankfurt School came, under the circumstances of fully empowered fascism, to examine the problem of “ideology,” they therefore had strong reasons to treat it as requiring not much more than the analysis of the mass manipulation of administered “illusions.” In their efforts to reconstruct how the Age of Reason had produced, as its result, the Destruction of Reason, Adorno and Horkheimer were forced to look back at the irrationalist element which, they argued, had always been present in the Enlightenment dream: they unearthed what they called “The Dialectic of Enlightenment.” 20