I've always thought that Adorno misread Hegel whilst defending him from the postivists. Consider these two passages from second section of Part three of Negative Dialectics entitled 'World Spirit and Natural History: An Excursion to Hegel.'

The first paragraph is taken from an entry called 'The Supramundane character of the Hegelian world spirit':

"By Hegel, however, notably by the Hegel of Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right, the historical objectivity that happened to come about is exalted into transcendence: 'This universal substance is not the mundane; the mundane impotently strives against it. No individual can get beyond this substance; he can differ from other individuals, but not from the popular spirit.'

The opposite of the 'mundane', the identity to which the particular entity is unidentically doomed, would thus be 'supramundane'. There is a grain of truth even to such ideology: the critic of his own popular spirit is also chained to what is commensurable to him, as long as mankind is splintered into nations." (p.323)

The Philosophy of Right is structured in terms of the liberal national nation-state whose life is divided into the family, civil society and the state.

Adorno then says:

"To gild the heteronomy of the substantially universal, Hegel mobilises Greek conceptions this side of experienced individuality. In such passages he vaults all historic dialects and unhesitatingly proclaims that morality's form in Antiquity, the form which was first that of official Greek philosophy and then the one of German Gymnasien, is its true form: 'For the morality of the state is not the moralistic, reflected one in which one's own convictions hold sway; this is more accessible to the modern world, while the true morality of Antiquity has its roots in every man's stand by his duty.'" (pp.324-325)

That interpretation ignores the way that Hegel places the individuality to the forefront and centre of internal, dynamic logic of the ethical life of civil society.

The core idea of Hegel's ethical is that I cannot (ethically) harm another without (ethically) harming myself because the flourishing and foundering of each is intimately bound up with the flourishing and foundering of all. Social space is always constituted ethically, as a space in which subjects are necessarily formed or deformed, freed or oppressed through the structures of interaction governing everyday life.

Ethical life is not about moral principles such as the categorical imperative; it is about the ways in which both particular actions and whole forms of action injure, wound, and deform recipient and actor alike; it is about the secret bonds connecting our weal and woe to the lives of all those around us.