ABSTRACT
Introduction Bill Bowring (2002) has objected to what he sees as too gentle a critique of law in my work, one that leaves too much of it, morally and politically, in credit. In contrast to my kindliness, he suggests an alternative starting point in the work of Theodor Adorno. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics has much to say about law that has remained unnoticed, and that is in his view more radical. There is some truth in this, Adorno could be extremely critical of law. A close reading of Negative Dialectics reveals, however, that alongside the negative things Adorno had to say, some were surprisingly positive. It is hard to reconcile two rather different sides to his argument. To add to the problem, his view of law is linked to an account of human freedom, but that account is neither clear nor univocal. In fact, it too is contradictory, so that a first reaction to Adorno’s views on law is to find them deeply confusing. However, Adorno had some extremely penetrating things to say about law and its relation to freedom, and more generally to the Kantian philosophy that underlay it. The first and main task of this chapter is therefore to retrieve and explicate Adorno’s account of law, and to seek to make best sense of it. To do so, it is necessary to bring the different aspects of his account into alignment lest his overall argument is lost in a number of competing, one-sided statements of his position.
