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

political and even its military power to ensure the continuance of “objectively irrational”
market relations and their extension all over the globe. 138
It is worth noting that this part of Adorno’s analysis gains credibility from recent
developments. Consider for instance the causes for the 2008 economic crisis, which were
incubated in the financial sphere, and which nonetheless brought various governments to
use their political leverage and tax-payer resources to bail the banks. Another case in
point is the current debt crises of certain European economies, where some governments
have yielded to the demands of non-political economic entities such as the European
Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund even in matters of internal political
governance in order to salvage existing economic arrangements. The cases of Greece,
Portugal, Ireland, and now Spain are exemplary. Of course, this primacy of economic
interests over the political state is old news to many poor states around the globe, but has
only recently begun to affect even the most developed countries. Also of interest are the
political maneuvers that some states have been forced to deploy to avoid being penalized
with a downgrade of their credit status by privately owned and operated financial rating
agencies. The austerity measures imposed by Italy and Spain are cases in point. What is
interesting about these cases is that they give some evidence for the idea that the
economy determines at least some extremely important decisions of internal governance,
even when these decisions are actively opposed by a majority of the people, and this in
turn brings into question the political sovereignty of the nation-state vis-à-vis the
138 An example here would be the use of economic coercion and even outright military force in
order to bring down a foreign government that opposes the economic interests of a particular society.
Consider, for instance Noam Chomsky’s analysis of US military intervention on Latin America in Profit
Over People: Neo-liberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999).
129