ABSTRACT
Immanuel Kant's concern with freedom may be read as an indirect defence of the rising bourgeois class' dissatisfaction with the political constraints of the then contemporary regime of European aristocratic power. This chapter addresses Kant's purported identity of transcendental and noumenal free in the categorical imperative, before drawing out what Theodor W. Adorno considers the underlying psychological and social implications of this moral imperative. It reviews Adorno's understanding of the contemporary relations between freedom and unfreedom. When Kant expands the idea of freedom beyond individual free will to include the free will of others in a kingdom of ends, or in what might be considered the formation of a free community under universally accepted laws, his idea of freedom nevertheless remains highly deceptive. The repressive features of Kant's categorical imperative are again evident in the mid-nineteenth century turn to positivism. Far from resolving the contradiction between free will and the moral law, Kant's recourse to noumenal intelligibility effectively exacerbates it.
