We intend to investigate some methodological and thematic common points and contrasts between two of the main philosophers from the first generation of Critical Philosophy – Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer –, on the one hand, and Ernst Cassirer, heir of the Marburger School of Neokantianism, on the other hand. With special attention to Cassirer’s The Myth of the State, from 1946, and The Dialectic of Enlightenment, published in 1947 by Adorno and Horkheimer, we aim to approximate their approach to the general philosophical question of culture and the emergence of totalitarianism: in both perspectives we find a critic of their time as one in which the reason – already instrumentalized at the time – is subdued by the power of mythical thinking, which leads