RowJimmy it's not a book I've spoken about or read in ages but there's a reason why in its native German it's considered the seminal work in the field. If you read it and then Habermas' Twelve Lectures which came 40 years later and explicitly references and criticises the Dialectic of Engagement you'd still think the latter was published after Habermas' book.
I'm not a Frankfurt acolyte, like almost any other school of thought it is too Euro-centric for my taste but it's a hell of a lot closer to describing the reasons for Western societal decay than Habermas is. Even before his mask fully slipped in recent years on Gaza, Ukraine etc the garbage he's written on how Western civilisation was the peak of humanity and brought about by "Judeo-Christian values" could've been found on a Cato Institute pamphlet.
