Catastrophe as Catalyst

The Frankfurt School’s analysis of Nazism emerged from catastrophe. Founded in Germany in the 1920s, the Institute for Social Research brought together thinkers at what the historian Eric Hobsbawm described as “a provisional way station between a dead past and a future not yet born.” After the Nazis came to power in 1933, most of the scholars were forced into exile. Their work on fascism became a kind of intellectual autopsy: an attempt to explain how Enlightenment ideals of reason, progress, and education had failed so catastrophically, producing not liberation but industrialised murder.

Their central and enduring insight was that rationality had been narrowed to its most impoverished form. What they called instrumental rationality is reason reduced to calculation and control, stripped of ethical judgement and critical reflection, oriented entirely toward efficiency rather than toward truth or the good. Reason, in this degenerate form, does not ask whether an end is worth pursuing. It asks only how most effectively to pursue whatever end has been given. The question of legitimacy disappears from the horizon entirely.

Truth as a Casualty of Power

This logic leads to one of the Frankfurt School’s most unsettling claims: under fascism, the distinction between truth and falsehood stops functioning as a moral guide. Statements are evaluated not by whether they correspond to reality but by whether they serve power. The epistemological and the ethical collapse together.

Theodor Adorno sharpens this point with his analysis of what he calls the “bare-faced lie.” Fascist leaders often say things that are obviously false, and repeat them with absolute confidence. The aim is not persuasion but domination. Over time, this repeated and brazen disregard for truth erodes people’s faith that facts matter at all. What is being destroyed is not simply the credibility of any particular claim but the very infrastructure of shared epistemic life. In his later work, Adorno argues that such movements possess no coherent vision, only a will to power. They therefore replace justification with manipulation, and argument with spectacle.

The Logic of Instrumental Rationality and Its Horrors

For the Frankfurt School, the pure efficiency of bureaucratic murder, the administrative and technological machinery of the death camps, were expressions of a rationality from which the human had been expelled, rather than expressions of irrationality or barbarism in the conventional sense.

This insight found powerful resonance far beyond the academic seminar. Conrad’s Kurtz, in Heart of Darkness, is instrumental reason’s most famous literary avatar: the man who has followed colonial logic to its terminal point. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now carries this same structure into Vietnam, where the logic of military optimisation consumes the ethical categories it was supposed to serve. In each case, the horror is not a failure of reason but its perverse fulfilment, ends justifying any means, calculation devouring conscience.

Andor, the most recent completed Star Wars series, also engages directly with these themes. Where the broader franchise presents evil mystically, Andor renders it administratively: the Empire operates as a vast bureaucratic machine, pursuing institutional objectives through routine procedure and detached efficiency. In Andor, evil dramatises what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. Season two sharpens the point further with a Wannsee-like conference in which the genocide of an entire planet is plotted as a logistical problem, atrocity reduced to procedure. Andor suggests that the Frankfurt School has become the default framework for serious popular narratives about fascism.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

What connects these imaginaries is the insight that a formalistic, procedural rationality provides no internal resistance to atrocity.

In The Evil of Banality Elizabeth Minnich argues that horrific wrongdoing often arises not from monstrous individuals but from ordinary thoughtlessness embedded in systems. Drawing on the work of her teacher Hannah Arendt, Minnich distinguishes between “intensive” evils (shocking acts by individuals that appear exceptional) and “extensive” evils, which develop gradually through the participation of many ordinary people and become normalised. Extensive evils rely on respectable “reliable workers” motivated by everyday ambitions.

Heidegger, Adorno, and the Strange Convergence

It is historically striking that Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental rationality finds unexpected agreement with Heidegger’s parallel critique of what he called calculative thinking (das rechnende Denken). Both are diagnosing the same pathology in modernity: a mode of cognition that grasps the world only as resource, as standing reserve to be optimised and exploited, incapable of the kind of reflective, contemplative attention that genuine thinking requires. The convergence is philosophically significant, even as the Frankfurt School, and Adorno in particular, were sharply critical of Heidegger on other grounds.

Hannah Arendt, who studied under Heidegger and maintained a complex relationship with his legacy, seems to have arrived at the most clarifying vantage point. Her move was to insist on the equivalence of National Socialism and Soviet Socialism, not as ideological cousins but as two faces of a single structural phenomenon: totalitarianism. The content of the ideology, fascist or communist, matters less than the form of domination it enables. Both were dictatorial tyrannies, and identifying them as such cleared the conceptual ground for what Arendt regarded as the deeper threat: the emerging technocracy, a regime that dispenses even with the need for a tyrant, a “tyranny without a tyrant” in which domination is accomplished through systems, procedures, and the elimination of the personal responsibility that makes genuine political life possible. For Arendt, responsibility does not require control. People remain answerable because they inhabit the world. What totalitarianism and technocracy share is the ambition to abolish that inhabitation.

In healthy democratic societies, speech is oriented toward mutual understanding. People make claims that can be questioned, criticised, and defended. Interlocutors are expected to give reasons and to take reasons seriously. Totalitarian propaganda destroys this structure: communication aims at control rather than understanding, and the space of genuine deliberation collapses.

Memory, Continuity, and the Thinning of Historical Time

The Frankfurt School’s analysis of fascism is usefully complemented by an analysis of what happens to a culture when it loses its capacity for historical self-understanding. This dimension of the problem has been developed with particular sharpness by Reinhart Koselleck, who described a widening gap between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. The past no longer prepares people for the future; the future no longer unfolds as a recognisable extension of the past. Historical continuity thins and fractures. What disappears is the sense of being carried within a story larger than oneself, of belonging to a tradition that links past and future through a meaningful present.

Modern societies, Pierre Nora argued, compensate for the loss of living memory by manufacturing its substitutes: museums, commemorations, anniversaries, heritage sites. The proliferation of memory institutions marks, paradoxically, the declining vitality of the social memory they are meant to preserve. The archive is built when memory begins to die.

Education Between Worlds

Zachary Stein’s concept of “education in a time between worlds” resonates powerfully with Koselleck’s analysis. Stein frames the contemporary moment as a transitional period in which old structures of understanding have collapsed and new ones have not yet formed. Students are trained for futures they struggle to imagine, using categories inherited from pasts they do not feel.

This connects to a theme that Hannah Arendt identified as central to education: the recovery of the capacity to think, and specifically to think against the grain of what is given. The phrase, being “startled back into thought,” captures something essential about what education at its best can do. It is the moment at which someone stops and asks, “What am I doing?” or, “How could I think otherwise about this?” Increasingly, education’s deepest task is attentiveness: the cultivation and sustaining of those fragile practices that make a common world possible, practices that instrumental rationality, left unchecked, systematically dissolves.

The Contemporary Resonance

The parallels between the Frankfurt School’s analysis and contemporary concerns about artificial intelligence are structural. The concept of “superintelligence” as pure optimisation, a system that maximises a given objective function without any internal capacity for ethical evaluation, is precisely the logic of instrumental rationality writ large and made autonomous. Efficiency and effectiveness as their own telos, calculation without human judgement or values: the critique remains entirely applicable.

The lineage of this logic runs deep. The intellectual genealogy of instrumental rationality, understood as optimisation and calculation applied to human affairs, passes through Hume’s is-ought gap, Spencer’s social Darwinism, Bentham’s utilitarian calculus, Adam Smith’s invisible hand, Darwin’s mechanism applied to society by Galton and others, Turing’s formalisation of computation, and the subsequent development of machine intelligence as the engineering of goal-directed systems. At each step, the question of what ends are worth pursuing, and for whom, tends to recede behind the question of how to pursue any given end more effectively.

The question the Frankfurt School posed, what form of reason is capable of sustaining genuine human responsibility in a world that increasingly runs on optimisation, remains unanswered. The Frankfurt School did not provide a complete solution. But they established, with great precision and at great personal cost, why the question cannot be avoided.

This article has been edited for length. The full article can be read on Jonathan Boymal’s Substack