Why Professor Habermas would fail a class on "Dialectic of Enlightenment"

Imagine that you are teaching a class on "Dialectic of Enlightenment"; and that Habermas submits "The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment" [1982/1985] as his coursework essay. Would you give him a pass mark for that essay? Using this polemical thought experiment set-up as an estrangement device, I critically discuss Habermas’s essay that was pivotal in his repositioning of Critical Theory in the 1980s. I argue that it is philosophically as well as biographically unreflective; and that he is engaging in underhand politicking. Part of my discussion is to re-consider "Dialectic of Enlightenment": Instead of viewing it as the dead-end that Habermas presents it to be, we can see as a self-therapeutical exercise in destabilizing a complacent self-conception whereby modernity is the pinnacle of moral progress – an exercise which might have a certain exemplarity for others in the on-going quest of making use of our own understanding. The contribution is rounded off with a postscript by a second assessor of Habermas’s essay, commenting both on the proposed assessment of the first, and the polemical thought experiment.