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

not only ever more powerful but also represents interests that do not map into the
particular interests of the states over which it exerts power. The result is that the political
sphere becomes a mere cover for the real locus of political power, which shifts more and
more decidedly to the hands of global economic bodies. This means that the state’s
subservience to the principle of exchange actually brings the state ever closer to its own
disintegration as a center of political power. So, subservience to the principle of
exchange does not further the internal ends of the nation-state but rather threatens the
latter with disintegration.
In the end, this is the point to take home about Adorno’s critique of Hegel’s
condition of internal autonomy, as I have reconstructed it here: Whereas Hegel takes it
that the central institutions of modern society are autonomous because their internal
dynamics follow principles of development internal to them and because, by following
these principles, each institution promotes the achievement of social goods internal to it,
Adorno argues that each of the institutions is actually heteronomous because it follows an
external principle—the principle of exchange—and in so doing does not further goods
internal to the institution but rather only the goals of the market, which actually
undermine the prolonged existence of the institution as an independent locus of social
activity: According to Adorno the family is in decline; civil society (as Hegel envisaged
it) is an ideological illusion; and the political nation-state’s sovereignty is already an
anachronism.
3.2.2 Hegel’s condition of the preservation of freedom
Although I did not indicate it explicitly, we have already discussed Adorno’s
reasons for rejecting the Hegelian condition of the preservation of freedom, which claims
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