Horkheimer and Adorno's pessimistic account of the “dialectic of enlightenment,” which traces the fate of reason from a prehistoric fear of the unknown to the brutal domination of modern instrumental rationality, sets the stage for Schoolman's project. While agreeing that violence lies at the core of formal reason, he argues that a “genealogical” reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment reveals an alternative subjectivity that rejects the subordination of world to mind. In an insightful revisiting of the Sirens episode, Schoolman claims that Odysseus's cunning ploy to both hear the Sirens and survive expresses a tension between formal reason—the desire to understand the world in its entirety—and an aesthetic receptivity to difference that lies beyond human comprehension. Charting an analogous dialectic in The Birth of Tragedy he invokes Nietzsche as similarly valorizing aesthetics as a means for individuality to engage with the world at the level of appearance while leaving its depths or essences inviolate.

Nietzsche and Adorno are ultimately positioned as complementary theorists of aesthetic individuality. On the one hand, Adorno champions aesthetics for exposing the limits of reason by ceaselessly affirming “nonidentity”: Art forces an awareness upon human thought that it can never come to know the thing in-itself, but must instead learn to accept the fathomless diversity of being. On the other hand, Nietzsche teaches us that such an ethical disposition need not be passive, but can actively fashion an individual identity by using the surfaces of the world as a mirror for its own creative powers. The poetry of Walt Whitman is offered as an exemplary modeling of aesthetic individuality as it revels indiscriminately in the many wonders of the world, while at the same time forsaking any attempt to capture their essence or order them hierarchically on the basis of their “true” worth.

Whitman's claim that the United States represents the ideal breeding ground for developing aesthetic individuality frames a critical inquiry into de Tocqueville's famous attack on liberal democracy for cultivating a homogeneous citizenry without differences. Through an innovative reading, Schoolman inverts de Tocqueville's schematic by showing how the “equality of condition” of democracy actually nurtures an interest in the “small differences” of individuals (as opposed to the “large differences” of classes) as an invaluable aid in the mimetic formation of identity. Hence, democracies protect the diversity needed for aesthetic individuality to flourish.

Schoolman's interpretations are engaging, innovative, and well written, and will be of interest to scholars of these thinkers. The book's principal arguments are developed clearly and coherently. His controversial readings, however, are bound to raise questions about the validity of his interpretations. More broadly, his failure to consider in any substantive way how the capitalist nature of contemporary democracy undermines aesthetic individuality is a significant shortcoming of the book.

In particular, Schoolman's treatment of Adorno suffers from a number of flaws. He provides an excessively Kantian analysis of critical theory, arguing that Adorno “forces a great ontological divide between all subjects and their objects, between human beings and being in all its diversity and difference” (p. 135). Such a conception completely reverses Adorno's basic philosophical objective: The divide between subject and object must be deconstructed, not affirmed. The illusion of a subject entirely distinct from the object is inevitably constitutive of an epistemology in which reason dominates all that lies without: hence, his positioning of Kant with Sade as complementary prophets of enlightenment. The error that attends the primordial formation of subjectivity lies in human forgetfulness of the nature that lies within: Horkheimer and Adorno choose Odysseus as “the prototype of bourgeois individuality” because of how his mastery of the external environment succeeds only by virtue of his willful separation from it, a Pyrrhic victory in light of the crippling disciplinary schematic this imposes upon the self.

Schoolman effectively dismisses Adorno's critique of capitalism as little more than a variant of the much broader condemnation of formal reason. Yet Adorno's account of commodity fetishism and the reification of social relations into “second nature” raises troubling concerns about Schoolman's own complacent invitation to “relate to the world receptively just as it appears before us” (p. 177). For instance, his benign claim that such adaptation proceeds via mimesis unwittingly echoes Adorno's far more ominous discussion of how the imitative rituals of mass culture replicate the conditions of a prehistoric past in which a terrified humanity had little choice but to mimetically propitiate a nature beyond its understanding. Schoolman's deeply conservative portrayal of Adorno's aesthetics as endorsing a passive orientation to the world sits very uneasily with the radical dialectical thrust of Adorno's portrayal of capitalism's systematic evisceration of the human potential for thought, feeling, and being.

Finally, while Schoolman's engagement with de Tocqueville is provocative and well reasoned, it hardly constitutes grounds for determining “the historical possibility for an aesthetic form of individuality in late modern democratic society” (p. 300). In particular, de Tocqueville's account of democracy as rooted in a general “equality of condition” is hopelessly antiquated when compared to the staggering inequalities that characterize existing capitalist democracies. Yet Schoolman unquestioningly accepts these founding assumptions as his own. Furthermore, the book fails to consider how difference and diversity within democratic societies are routinely undermined and subordinated by the corporate media's need for mass culture that can be cheaply produced, effectively promoted, and easily consumed, a rather peculiar absence in a work that claims Adorno as its inspiration.

As theoretical discourse, Reason and Horror has much to offer, and its core principle of aesthetic individuality offers an intriguing discussion of the relevance of aesthetics to questions of ethics and politics. However, its central message that individuals accept the world at face value as an aesthetic resource for self-fashioning is simply inadequate in a time when the “reason” of democratic capitalism is consistently invoked to explain away the “horror” that rules the lives of so many.