Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the Enlightenment aimed at liberating us from fear through reason: ‘The spirit of enlightenment relaced the fire and the rack by the stigma it attached to all irrationality’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1986 : 31). However, the dialectic of Enlightenment is such that it brings in new forms of domination which become so overpowering that they filter through to every level of society, every institution and indeed our very ways of thinking. Enlightenment thinking extinguishes the traces of its own self-consciousness. Thought loses its element of self-refliection and becomes alienated, reified and ritualised.