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Example research essay topic: Institute For Social Research Horkheimer And Adorno - 2,178 words

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Jonathan Swifts satire of the use of reason during the Enlightenment For most people Jonathan Swift is nothing more than the man who wrote Gulliver's Travels - or, to be more precise, the author of the first part of that strange satire. For Brobdinbnag, Laura and the land of the Houyhnhnms are distant countries of which we know little or nothing at all. And even Lemuel Gulliver's enforced stay on the island of Lilliput is often regarded as best suited to children with a taste for fairy tales. Mistakes committed by Ignorance in a virtuous Disposition, would never be of such fatal Consequence to the Publick Weal, as the Practices of a Man whose Inclinations led him to be corrupt, and had great Abilities to manage, and multiply, and defend his Corruptions. (Travels, part 1) Victoria Glendinning's biography leaves no doubt about why so much of his work is now forgotten or ignored. Almost all of what he wrote was a commentary on the politics of his time - the fading glories of the 1688 revolution to the establishment of the Hanoverian succession. It was a ghastly period in English politics.

The great concerns of the day were patronage and preferment. What little ideological passion there was concerned the church's relationship with the state. Swift did well to manufacture two classic satires from such unpromising material. nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison (Travels, part 2) Even A Tale of a Tub - which was Swifts first (though initially anonymous) success and ran to five editions in six years - was made popular because it possessed what Glendinning calls a perilous resonance for his politically aware readers [which] is largely lost on us. Yet I am not sure what peril Swift accepted as the price of publication. The allegory concerns three sons who are given coats by their father with strict instructions about how they should be worn and cared for.

The coats represent religious doctrine and it is the lucky man who wears the Church of England, who is the least ridiculous and despised and pleases his father best (A Tale of a Tub). A Tale of a Tub was published in 1704, two years after the accession of Queen Anne. Proclaiming the superiority of Protestantism on the eve of the War of the Spanish Succession (admittedly while poking a little fun at its pretensions) does not seem very perilous to me. The mark of literary greatness is the ability to write about immediate experiences in a way, which has universal application.

Swifts comments on government at the turn of the 17 th century certainly have 20 th-century overtones. In this un ideological age there will be many commentators who agree that government is not a profound science, but requires no more, in reality, than diligence, honesty and a moderate share of plain common sense. And I think that I have heard Margaret Thatcher, extolling her fathers record in Grantham local government, insist, a small infusion of the alderman is necessary to those who are employed in public places (Glendinning). But Swifts entire political outlook was perverted by his position in society as well as by the corruption of the time.

After his early and unsuccessful attempts to obtain preferment within the church, he moved to London and went to court for the gossip and the contact and also in the hope of picking up a dinner, as he put it, for free. Glendinning justifies his behavior with the explanation that he was a poor man living among rich men on equal terms, which is a difficult position to be in. That is undoubtedly true. But Swift chose to occupy that unhappy state. In her introduction, Glendinning reports that the question most frequently asked of biographers is, Do you like him? .

The best that she can say of Swift is that, although not always nice in our sense of loveable and pleasant, in keeping company with him we are not wasting our time. It may be contemporary prejudices, which make me feel little attraction in a spin-doctor, writing propaganda for the ministry's politics, satirizing the opposition, testing opinion by flying kites and judicious leaks - particularly when the spin-doctor changed parties, as much out of self-interest as disillusion. But it has always seemed to me that Swift possessed personal shortcomings that damaged his writing. His complicated relationships with the women in his life would have been none of our business had they not resulted in Cadenus and Vanessa - a not very impressive mock classical apology for his behavior towards a woman who is said to have died of shock after the discovery that he loved another. But the bitterness, which often seems to be the most dominant feature of his character, gives even his most brilliant satire an unattractive edge. It was not only the filth, about which Glendinning writes so frankly, that offended critics as diverse as A L Rose, Thackeray and D H Lawrence.

The best satire is based on humor, not hatred. Swifts essentially unattractive nature is the problem of the Glendinning biography. It is, like all her work, meticulously researched and wonderfully related to the spirit of the age in question. But it is prejudiced by ambivalence about Swift himself.

The biographer does not need to like, or even admire, the subject of the biography. But it is necessary to have a view - in addition to the self-evident conviction that he or she is worth 300 pages. Glendinning's Swift neglects detailed analysis of the tales in favor of anecdotes about the teller. It is as if the biographer is less certain about the literary importance than she is about the gossip column attraction of his life at court - the mad parson wearing his clerical gown among the finery and failing to keep up with the scintillating conversation of the coffee-house wits. It is as a writer, not a flawed human being, that Swift justifies 300 years of interest. Just as he writes: ...

Reason did not extend it self with the Bulk of the Body: On the contrary, we observed in our Country, that the tallest Persons were usually least provided with it. That among other Animals, Bees and Ants had the Reputation of more Industry, Art and Sagacity, than many of the larger Kinds; (Travels, part 2), meaning that the tallest people in the country usually are not that smart as they want to be seen. It may be that Glendinning finds some of his literary idiosyncrasies difficult to analyze. She deals with the filth in detail - both the scatological poems and the apparent obsession with bodily functions and the preoccupation with defecation that rears its soiled head in everything from Gulliver's Travels to what she calls the dirty poems of the early 1730 s.

She justifies the dirt with reference to other writers who have dealt with similar subjects, but other writers who have been excoriated for filth normally exulted the virtues of the carnal activity, which they described. Swift - who could not bear to hear the word bowels - wrote about what he regarded as disgusting. It is a strange preoccupation for a writer who, according to his admirers, wanted to make the world a better place. I winked at my own Littleness as People do at their own faults. (Travels, part 2) Another significant work by Jonathan Swift to mention in this report is The Modest Proposal.

In his introduction, Swifts projector explains the reason for his proposal: for Preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland, from being a Burden to their Parents or Country; and for making them beneficial to the Public. (The Modest Proposal). Swifts dehumanizing satire strives to shed light on the horrible situation of English/Irish tensions in Ireland. On a basic level Swift indicts the English Protestants for their cruel and inhumane treatment of the papists, or poor Catholics, through both political and economic oppression. This is seen most clearly when his projector muses that England would be more than willing to eat the Irish even without such a proposal, saying, I could name a country which would be glad to eat up our whole nation without it.

Yet perhaps even more criticism is heaped on the Irish for not recognizing the horror of their own situation, and not taking constructive steps to remedy the problem. The very fact that such an immodest proposal can be given and received with such seriousness proves that all peoples involved have lost even the thinnest shred of human decency and respect. On a larger lever, Swift successfully indicts the brutality of man as a whole. I can think of no one objection that will possibly be raised against this proposal. (A Modest Proposal) A Modest Proposal goes well beyond the limits of Europe, shedding a sickening light on all humanity and the way in which we treat each other. (Wooley) Fifty is an awkward age, for books no less than people. While it is not quite time to think of it as inhabiting a different age, there are difficulties in viewing a work of social criticism written in 1947 as a commentary on our world.

To reread the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972 [ 1947 ]) is to be tossed between moments of recognition (a world in which people willingly wear clothing that sports the logo of its manufacturer makes the chapter on the culture industry look terribly prescient) and of bewilderment (it is hard, at a time when little serious music is found on the radio, to appreciate why Toscaninis broadcasts could move Adorno to such disgust). At fifty, the Dialectic of Enlightenment has become one of those books that can neither be regarded simply as a piece of history nor taken un problematically as addressing our concerns. Perhaps because so much in the Dialectic of Enlightenment nevertheless remains current, it is worth resisting the temptation to enlist it in current debates in the humanities and social sciences. It might be worthwhile to subject it to the same sort of historical distancing that historians of political thought have urged us to bring to other texts. If there is something to be gained by recognizing that, whatever he was doing, John Locke was not fighting our battles, it might not be too soon to suggest- if only for a moment- that we should not expect Horkheimer and Adorno to do our work for us.

Separating the Dialectic of Enlightenment from our concerns might allow us to get a better handle on what these two German-Jewish exiles were attempting, half a century ago, when they settled into the hills just outside Hollywood to begin work on this most peculiar of books. Such an approach has more to recommend it than the simple fact that the book has turned fifty. Over the last decade, the staff of the Horkheimer Archive has, through the publication of Horkheimer's Nachlass and correspondence, made available to those scholars willing to make the effort the resources needed to begin reconstructing the process by which the Dialectic of Enlightenment was written. In what follows I will draw on three sets of materials: (1) the manuscript drafts and transcripts of discussions from the period of the composition of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, published as Volume 12 of the Gesammelte Schrifien; (2) Horkheimer's letters from the same period, published in Volumes 16 and 17; and (3) the critical edition of the Dialectic of Enlightenment itself, published as Volume 5, which for the first time provides a thorough documentation of the differences between the 1944 version of the book, circulated in mimeograph among the associates of the Institute for Social Research, and the 1947 version published by Queries in Amsterdam. (1) In the argument that follows, I will begin by considering some of the differences between the 1944 and the 1947 versions and then explore some of the concerns with truth and language that lie at the origin of the project. I will conclude with a discussion of the development of Horkheimer and Adorno's views on the relation of mythology and enlightenment, and suggest how their rethinking of this relationship laid the groundwork for what would become the overarching argument of the book.

What eventually would become the Dialectic of Enlightenment first entered the world in December 1944 as a mimeographed typescript of over three hundred pages distributed to friends and associates of the Institute for Social Research. Printed on the brown pasteboard cover was the original title: Philosophische Fragments. Theodor Adorno provided an explanation of sorts for the works peculiar mode of dissemination in one of the aphorisms he presented to his coauthor Max Horkheimer the next February on the occasion of Horkheimer's fiftieth birthday: In a world where books have long lost all likeness to books, the real book can no longer be one. If the invention of the printing press inaugurated the bourgeois era, the time is at hand for its repeal by the mimeograph, the only fitting, the unobtrusive means of dissemination (Adorno, ...


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