Enlightening: Adorno’s and Kant’s contrasting answers to the question “How to write about the Enlightenment?”

The content of Kant’s Enlightenment text has received much critical reception, but very stance Kant takes as its author has been largely ignored. Similarly, there has been much critical discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment” in terms of the theses they (purportedly) endorse, while their authorial voice has mostly received either no attention or been criticised as problematic rhetoric. In this paper, I take a different approach to both texts, focusing on the two respective writerly stances. I suggest that Kant’s one harbours an implicit epistemic authoritarianism, in contrast to the self-therapeutic stance Adorno and Horkheimer’s text exemplifies.