critique of Hegel’s practical philosophy with Adorno’s own critique of Hegel (Chapter 4), I show that Adorno’s commitment to the negativity of the dialectic entails a conception of social theory that has not sufficiently addressed the implications of its materialist transformation. This thesis offers an interpretation of Adorno’s treatment of history in his conception of our epistemic limits and potential. Adorno’s ideas about history lead us in myriad directions. For Hegel, the transcendental anchor that holds Spirit's identity intact was no longer God, the soul, or even an Ego or internal subject perched in the back of our brains witnessing our lives and history march by. What Adorno was perceiving in Beethoven was a musical expression of the sort of revolution in thought that Hegel's work initiated. trated by contrasting Hegel's notion of recognition with the Utopian dimension of Adorno's ideas on non-identity and mimetic reconciliation. Commentators continue to critically examine these issues. Adorno on late capitalism Totalitarianism and the welfare state. To Adorno, Hegel’s integral logic of identity is a sham, a sleight of hand which survives only because it is accepted as “adequate.” On the contrary, Adorno remarks, “[i]t is precisely the insatiable identity principle that perpetuates antagonism by suppressing contradiction. It is shown that in opposi tion to those who regard Adorno exclusively as a philosopher and aesthetic theorist, his ideas have … Commentators continue to critically examine these issues. Adorno absorbs from Hegel both a reliance on determinate negation as the path to truth and a recognition of the interconnected character of society as a whole (albeit as a false totality, for Adorno). It is also one of the topics wherein Hegel features for Adorno both as a figure to be overcome and as a figure from whom to learn. Like Hegel Adorno sees dialectical thinking as the key to resolving the difficulties enlightenment thought had become submerged in, in particular the antinomies that Kant had attempted to address, the collapse of idealism into scepticism, the insuperable barrier between subject and object. Adorno’s ideas about history lead us in myriad directions. It is also one of the topics wherein Hegel features for Adorno both as a figure to be overcome and as a figure from whom to learn. My argument is that we can formulate a version of the WLC that stands a chance of convincing ‘the Hegelian’ by focusing on the Kierkegaardian heritage of Adorno’s ideas: specifically, by understanding Adornian ‘wrongness’ to be analogous to ‘despair’, a concept which Kierkegaard explores at length in The Sickness Unto Death. So Adorno agrees with Hegel in that art has a higher vocation than just providing entertainment, but in Adorno’s view, that vocation is to be radically critical and negative and for art to be (socially) critical it must struggle against its own tendency to ‘affirmation’. Adorno’s work relies upon a reduction of Hegel that remains Adorno’s relation to Hegel is thus ambivalent: Adorno’s critique of enlightenment appears both Hegelian and anti-Hegelian, to rest on both acceptance and rejection of …