Adorno, Hegel and the concrete universal

Abstract

The core argument of this article is that Adorno adopts the distinction between an abstract and a concrete universal from Hegel and criticizes Hegel, on that basis, as abstract. The first two parts of the article outline that both thinkers take the abstract universal to be the form of a false type of knowledge and society, and the concrete universal to be a positive aim. However, as the third part argues, Adorno rejects how the concrete universal is understood in Hegel’s philosophy and formulates a different conception of it. The fourth part questions if Adorno manages to overcome the problems he identifies in Hegel or whether they are inherent to the programme of dialectics both endorse.

Liberalism and critical Marxism: a reply to Glasman and Rutherford

“…Lilla's critique of 'identity liberalism' is that by solely focusing on these supposedly closed, static categories of identity, by demanding that members of each category should 'stay in their lane,' the shared social experiences and histories that overlap and blur the lines between categories are ignored. That old aim of the left, the possibility of building a truly concrete universalitynot a universality that oppresses or wipes out particularity, or fixes it in place, but one that gives it the freedom to be expressed and recombined in new forms within a shared space of commonality and solidarity -is hereby lost (see Baumann 2011). This opens the door to reactionary appeals to a 'white identity' which feels under threat from the rise of the 'other', and demands its own separate status.…”

Economic Objectivity and Its Discontents: Reflections on Marx, Adorno and Utopia

“…At its core it is a political desire for a utopia in which difference and individuality are no longer suppressed but are instead constitutive of a unity free from the bounds of conceptual identification (Baumann 2011;81-82). Within the concrete universal, nonidentity would be liberated and able to be represented on its own terms.…”

Hegel and Marx on Individuality and the Universal Good

“…a universal good that contains particular interests. In Hegelian terminology, this is called a ‘concrete universal’ (see Baumann 2011). In fact, I propose, the aims of the state and its rationality consist in nothing but uniting individuals in an organic social system to the effect that different social groups or ‘organs’ are related in a mutually beneficial manner.…”