Adorno's conflictedness about Hegel

Hegel's ubiquity in Adorno and Adorno's conflictedness about him are evident even to beginners, but hitherto it needed hard-won expertise to discriminate Adorno's near-idolatry of Hegel from his often angry critique of him.

By contrast, History and Freedom compels Adorno to engage systematically with the major Hegelian themes: the [historicized] dialectic, universal and particular, identity and non-identity, objectivity and subjectivity, self-consciousness (both individual and collective), the World Spirit, the Absolute, conscience and law, race and nation. (Short version of the critique: Hegel too often ontologizes or absolutizes one term of a binary pair, thus reifying what he, of all people, should have kept fluid and "dialectical"; worse, Hegel's lapse into this error is always in favor of the "universal" and against the "particular," for the master and against the slave.)

When Adorno mentions (without quoting) some "famous" remark from Hegel (or whomever), Rolf Tiedemann's expert notes quote generously from the relevant sources, with invariably helpful comment--and, often, instructive pointers to dissonances with Adorno's other writings. (Adorno here also gives his most straightforward evaluation of Kant.)

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