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This article examines Theodor W. Adorno's critique of Oswald Spengler's major work The Decline of the West, aiming to situate Adorno's articles on Spengler in the broader context of his oeuvre. It specifically highlights the connection between those texts and the Dialectic of Enlightenment and argues that Adorno's critique of Spengler mainly targets the latter's relativism or, to be more precise, his rejection of the idea of normative truth that eventually leads him to blatantly renounce the normative ideals of Enlightenment philosophy. In fact, Adorno's essays on Spengler strongly suggest that the Dialectic of Enlightenment should not be read as a total critique of the concept of reason, for it is precisely its bond to the notions of reason and normative truth that distinguishes not only the thought of Adorno, but that of the early Frankfurt School in general from the critique of liberalism articulated by the intellectuals of the German radical right during the interwar period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses, from a Frankfurt School perspective on law identified with Franz Neumann and more recently Habermas, the attack upon the principles of war criminality formulated at the Nuremberg trials by the increasingly influential legal and political theory of Carl Schmitt. It also considers the contradictions within certain of the defence arguments that Schmitt himself resorted to when interrogated as a possible war crimes defendant at Nuremberg. The overall argument is that a distinctly internal, or “immanent”, form of critique is required of Schmitt's position, in which its is found wanting even on its own terms. In principle, the application of this dialectical mode of critique can allow a genuine debate to emerge between those seeking to continue both the Schmittian and critical theory traditions, whilst safeguarding the latter from the dangers of formulating polemical interventions that are, in effect, counterproductive to their own intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]