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

that social freedom, or the freedom that individuals achieve as citizens of the state, both
makes possible and preserves personal and moral freedom.
With regard to personal freedom—the individual’s negative freedom from
external coercion as a universal, abstract member of civil society—we saw in Adorno’s
critique of Hegel’s conception of civil society that he takes this institutional sphere to
emaciate individuality from qualitative content and to reduce individuals to mere
consumers, equal only in their lack of substantial identity and in their total susceptibility
to determination by the market. This utter vulnerability to determination by the principle
of exchange is anything but a form of freedom.
Further, with respect to moral freedom—the individual’s self-determination in
accordance with her own vision of the Good—we have seen that such self-determination
is in Adorno’s view actually made impossible by the preponderance of the principle of
exchange. Adorno’s idea that the phenomenon of ego-weakness has become widespread,
with the result that individuals are directly molded by the principle of exchange, results in
the virtual impossibility of individual autonomy. The psychological conflict between a
strong super-ego and the id, which he takes to be a necessary condition for the
development of the capacity for autonomy, has been virtually eliminated by the
impossibility of the internalization of familial authority. Hegel’s idea that the modern
social order is structured in a manner that preserves and promotes personal and moral
freedom is thus false on Adorno’s view.
3.2.3 Hegel’s condition of the autonomy of the whole
I have reconstructed in detail Adorno’s arguments against the Hegelian idea that
the central institutions of modern society are autonomous. However, it could still be the
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