CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

individuals of all particularity, reduces them to commodities, alienates them from
themselves, and makes them easy targets of control by the external market forces to
which they must adapt themselves in order to survive and by the measure of which they
come to measure their own self-worth. As Julian Roberts notes, “The subordination of
individuality to market-defined function does not merely facilitate economic
organization—it also destroys the identity and happiness of the human beings involved.
It is not possible to alienate segments of one’s life without also alienating oneself from
the means of self-determination. The humanity that remains after the labor market has
exacted its toll is no more than an empty husk.” 131
The sphere of civil society is thus, according to Adorno, radically heteronomous.
First, Adorno claims that the internal dynamics of civil society are determined not by a
principle internal to civil society but rather by the principle of exchange. Second, he
claims that as a result civil society does not in fact further the ends that Hegel assigned to
it. Instead of promoting equality in market relations, it consists of unequal and unfair
economic exchange between capitalists and workers; and, instead of promoting a
substantial notion of equal rights—one based on the equal qualitative dignity of every
individual—it bottoms out in the abstract equality of individuals as abstract laborers, who
are equal only in the emptiness of qualitative content according to which they are
measured, and according to which they in turn come to measure themselves.
131 Roberts, Julian, “The Dialectic of Enlightenment,” in Rush, Fred, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 62-3.
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