Kierkegaard’s moral universalism is class-bound bourgeois ideology, not genuine universality.

Evidence

According to Adorno, rather than criticise the social conditions responsible for impoverished individuality, for the isolation of individuals (die Vereinzelung der Einzelnen), Kierkegaard seeks a solution to the problem of injustice between human beings within individuality itself. The ‘universality of the moral law’ proclaimed by Kierkegaard, a law whose ‘universality’ he immediately restricts to the bourgeoisie, has both its genesis and limits in his own unenlightened’classconsciousness’:Kierkegaardproduceshistheorynotarbitrarily but as a representative of the interests of his class, interests which disguise themselves as the public interest. … Following Lukács, the experience of being turned into a commodity is taken as a totalising experience: ‘in a society dominated by exchange-value, things are “immediately” accessible to the person’ no longer. Thus,atthesametime,everyphilosophywhichassumesanindividual-in-itself, or assumes within the individual a pure essence of subjectivity unaffected by objective social reality, has become obsolete. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 178

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the historiographical debate the reader is pursuing: Adorno’s commodity-form analysis as rooted in Lukács and rejecting individualist philosophy. Resonates with other critical-theory sources on ideology critique and false universality. — connects to: Kierkegaard’s private ethic serves as deceptive class moral. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 177; Marx rejected Enlightenment progressivism by treating bourgeois society as class exploitation — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 262; Ideology expresses lived imaginary relations rather than actual conditions of existence. (+4 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies the ‘totalising experience’ of commodification central to Adorno’s early work — the claim that commodity exchange mediates all access to the world.

Broader Connections

• Marx rejected Enlightenment progressivism by treating bourgeois society as class exploitation #expands (0.82) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 262
• Intellectuals are class-bound, not an autonomous social category #corroborates (0.82) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 433
• Ideology expresses lived imaginary relations rather than actual conditions of existence. #expands (0.78)
• Ideology expresses how people live their relation to conditions, not the relation itself. #expands (0.78) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 893
• Belief in Western cultural universality is false, immoral, and dangerous #complicates (0.75)
• The concept of ideology was born torn between historical relativism and universal truth. #corroborates (0.72)