Both doctrines of free will and unfreedom serve to legitimate existing social domination.

Evidence

The individual scientific disciplines, forced to side with determinism as a result of their search for scientific laws, left the question of free will to philosophy, which answered it in terms of pre-scientific, apologetic ideas. As a result, philosophy confirmed the criminality of subjects whom the sciences presented as determined. If the thesis of free will burdens the dependent individuals with the social injustice they can do nothing about, if it ceaselessly humiliates them with desiderata they cannot fulfil, the thesis of unfreedom, on the other hand, amounts to a metaphysically extended rule of the status quo. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 638

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Adorno’s move is that determinism and voluntarism are not opposed errors but twin apologies for the status quo — a genuinely dialectical point that resists a one-line summary.
• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School material on the administered world and to the Weberian fact-value split the sciences inherit.