Horkheimer read Antigone as a prophecy, not a permanent family-society clash.

Evidence

However, Horkheimer did not entirely reject Hegel’s alternative notion of the family as a preserve of ethical resistance against social dehumanization. Where he criticized Hegel was for his shortsighted hypostatization of the opposition between family and civil society. Antigone’s relationship to her brother, which Hegel interpreted as a symbol of the inevitable antagonism between family and society, was to Horkheimer a foretaste of the rational society of the future. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 415

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Hegel’s Antigone reading in the Phenomenology and to Marxist feminist critiques of the bourgeois family.