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The final version of Dialectic of Enlightenment, a book that (as I’ve argued in an earlier post) may have less to do with “the Enlightenment” than its critics sometimes assume, was published at the end of 1947 and more or less ignored for the next two decades.1 A few months earlier a discussion of the Enlightenment that is now completely forgotten turned up in a rather unlikely place: the September 15, 1947 issue of LIFE magazine. No less unlikely was its uncredited author, a man who, a year later, would become famous for things other than his writing: Whittaker Chambers.
Chambers had joined Henry Luce’s influential and profitable publishing empire eight years earlier with an article for Time on Finnegans Wake. Prior to that, he had written for various Communist publications and worked as a spy for the Soviets. By 1937 he had broken with the…
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