What is freedom? In my Introduction to Philosophy course, I give a case against andfor freedom. But what I don't tell the students there is that we could take the discussion much further.
We start with modern liberalism. Liberal thought (what is called "conservative" in the United States today) holds that freedom is something that the individual has or does not have. This is the goal of the Enlightenment, to enable people to realize freedom in their own lives, which means taking away the impediments to freedom in the social or political world. Hence, freedom has meant resistance to totalitarianism in whatever form it shows itself, as well as the promotion of mechanisms to allow freedom to manifest itself, most importantly the market.
But what if freedom is not simply a condition of the individual? What if it is in fact it is a social condition? Critical theory holds that to the extent that we simply think of it as an attribute of the individual, we are unable to realize its extent.
Furthermore, to the extent that we start from an abstract definition of freedom, we end up thinking of freedom in purely instrumental terms. Freedom is just about the ability to get what we what. But that is tied to a particular form of reason, one we might call "formal rationality".
For the critical theorists (particularly Lukacs), formal rationality is closely tied to capitalism. When we start thinking of everything as commodifiable (that is, made into an object of exchange, its value located outside of itself in what it will bring in open exchange, and equivalence as defined as things which have the same exchange value), we start thinking of all of life in those terms. In other words, if everything is a commodity, or if commodity relations are the model of value in society, then all society becomes valued on a single numerical system. Think of it - can you give a price to all things that are worth having or being? You may not think so, but think harder. Education has a price. Love can be thought of in terms of exchange. We think of life itself in terms of its relative value, to other lives at least.
Horkheimer and Adorno take this further than Lukacs. They think that formal rationality dominates all of life. Bureaucracies regiment everything; markets give the illusion of freedom; technology gives the illusion of power. This is not necessarily something new. It goes back to when we used myths to organize the world.