If we are to believe the epigraph from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which stands at the beginning of this study, the presentation and critique of ideas are inextricably intertwined insofar as both involve the inherently negative “effort of conceptualization.” My presentation of the transformation of Horkheimer’s Critical Theory in the preceding chapter was carried out very much in this critical spirit. This study of Horkheimer has led me to the conclusion that Horkheimer’s and the Institute’s work from the late 1920s and 1930s could serve as a more promising point of departure for contemporary efforts to renew Critical Theory than his writings after 1940. In what follows, I would like briefly to present some additional reasons and evidence for this conclusion. Any attempt to make such an argument must, of course, reckon with the formidable Dialectic of Enlightenment. Although I have attempted throughout this study to adhere methodologically to Hegel’s insistence that critique can proceed only on the basis of conceptual presentation, I would like to propose a shortcut here – one that, hopefully, will not compromise my main conclusion. Rather than reconstructing the main arguments of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the following critical remarks will rely instead on two of the main arguments from the preceding chapter: First, that the most important reason for the transformation of Horkheimer’s thought around 1940 was his adoption of a modified version of Friedrich Pollock’s “state capitalism” thesis; and second, that this transformation reached a preliminary culmination in “The End of Reason.” With this essay, Horkheimer crossed a threshold into a qualitatively new phase in the development of his thought. It laid the foundations for his two most substantial theoretical works of this period: Dialectic of Enlightenment and Eclipse of Reason. Insofar as Dialectic of Enlightenment rests on the arguments presented in “The End of Reason” and on the “state capitalism” thesis in particular, the criticisms presented in Chapter 9 of the latter text can also be applied to the former. Chapter 9 should have made clear that the shift from a historically specific, self-reflexive theory of capitalism to a tendentially transhistorical critique of power and the domination of nature, which plays such a crucial role in Dialectic of Enlightenment, is already present in “The End of Reason.” Nonetheless, let me identify the limits of my critique right away by stating the obvious: The arguments presented in “The End of Reason” by no means exhaust Dialectic of Enlightenment. There are many aspects of Dialectic of Enlightenment that move well beyond “The End of Reason” and that are still relevant to contemporary theoretical discussions – such as the critique of the culture industry and the multidimensional analysis of anti-Semitism. So my plaidoyer here for a critical historicization of Dialectic of Enlightenment will be limited to those aspects of the text – which are, nonetheless, substantial – anticipated by “The End of Reason.”