Few scholars have done more in recent decades to preserve the legacy of Theodor Adorno than Peter Gordon. An intellectual historian at Harvard, Gordon first rose to prominence in the 2000s with his prize-winning works on the affinities between Heidegger and Rosenzweig and the Heidegger–Cassirer debate. These were followed by Adorno and Existence (2016), in which Gordon set out to recover Adorno’s forceful critique of Heidegger, and existentialism more broadly, as a form of anti-rationalist metaphysics rooted in late-capitalist alienation. In his recent writings, including his introduction to the new edition of The Authoritarian Personality, Gordon makes the case for the continued relevance of the Frankfurt School’s analysis of totalitarianism, bringing it to bear on the rise of the contemporary far right. Yet his chief contribution arguably lies in his careful, systematic reconstruction of Adorno’s peculiar form of materialism – which is said to underpin his conception of the ‘good life’.

If the aim of Adorno and Existence was to highlight the ‘negative’ dimension of Adorno’s project – his critical interrogation of existentialism – then the central ambition of Gordon’s new book, A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity, is to recover the positive, normative dimension of his theory of modernity. For Gordon, Adorno not only offers a scathing account of how the modern bourgeois form of life has failed; he also ‘measures that failure against a maximalist demand for happiness or human flourishing’. Gordon identifies the demand for happiness as Adorno’s ‘source of normativity’: the standard in light of which dysfunction of a given social order becomes legible. Happiness, thus conceived, is not solely a matter of sensuous gratification or the fulfilment of desire. It derives from the more capacious idea of eudaimonia, which encompasses both material and spiritual forms of satisfaction.

Gordon’s interpretation is pitted against ‘negativist’ readers of Adorno like Axel Honneth, Jürgen Habermas and Fabian Freyenhagen, for whom the philosopher offers no real argument about how we ought to live, since this would necessarily reflect the deforming capitalist order from which it is derived. A Precarious Happiness shows that Adorno is not a ‘totalizing normative sceptic’, but rather a thinker who understands the human potentiality for flourishing as a robustly normative criterion – one which grounds the very possibility of social critique. Without this positive valence, critical theory could neither identify the problems with the present system nor provide an alternative vision. Although this ‘source of normativity’ might seem at odds with Adorno’s commitment to immanent critique, Gordon insists that every social world expresses the demand for happiness in a historically distinctive way. Because the historical norms for flourishing in a given form of life often ‘stand in conflict’ with each other, it becomes possible to measure a social form against its own ideals.

Gordon’s book is a welcome attempt to re-found the project of social critique by offering a reflexive account of the type of beings that we are. Over its six core chapters, plus its long introduction and brief conclusion, A Precarious Happiness provides a mostly convincing analysis of Adorno’s project as a kind of critical Aristotelianism. The preface to the English edition – Gordon’s book grew out of three lectures given for the Adorno-Vorlesungen in 2019 – comprises a brief biographical contextualization of the ‘anti-negativist’ reading, focusing in particular on the infamous 1969 incident in which Adorno called the police on student protesters occupying his classroom. Adorno defended himself against the activists in a radio address later that year, rejecting the ‘imperatives of premature action’ and proposing that ‘emphatic thinking’ was the only way, at present, to hold out an emancipatory horizon.

Over the course of the book, Gordon elaborates this concept of emphatic thinking as a means of conceptualizing social life in terms of its own internal standards. He claims that Adorno’s thought is not ‘restricted to the knowledge of the false’ but committed to developing the neo-Aristotelian idea of a human potentiality for flourishing. Gordon posits an anthropological version of this thesis, according to which the potential in question is an attribute of our nature as human beings and does not admit of rational justification; the source of normativity here is not reason but nature. As such, Adorno’s model of critical theory is indebted to Marx, even if ‘Adorno was far too idiosyncratic and heterodox a thinker to permit us to categorize his work as part of the official canon of Marxist doctrine’. Crucially, Adorno understands forms of historical life in terms of constitutive norms, or ‘oughts’, of which real life can itself fall short. What’s needed, then, is not only to reform our practices to bring them in line with such norms, but to undertake a revolutionary revision of the norms themselves.

Gordon considers two pitfalls which Adorno’s model of immanent critique avoids: it neither claims a privileged access to moral and political insights that other social agents are unable to attain, nor does it assume that our historical world must be rejected wholesale, such that Adorno’s own critical standpoint – itself a product of that world – becomes unintelligible. Adorno steers clear of this Scylla and Charybdis by remaining steadfastly committed to a critique of society by its own lights, which enables him to ground his standpoint in bourgeois modernity itself. This implies a rejection of the ‘logic of identity’ that controls the Hegelian model of dialectical inquiry: Adorno develops the paradoxical concept of the ‘non-identical’ as ‘that which resists conceptual determination’. Were the world exhaustively determined by our concepts, so the claim goes, we would be unable to locate points of discrepancy between social reality and the norms that govern it, and the possibility of change would be lost.

The emphatic concept of human life, for Gordon, lies in happiness qua Aristotelian flourishing. ‘Happiness’ condenses into a ‘single word . . . the nearly impossible demand that humanity lives up to its own concept’. Gordon draws a distinction between the genesis of norms and their validity, arguing that the genealogical tracing of a norm to contingent historical circumstances need not impugn it. The concept of happiness will always be inflected by (and have its origins in) social and historical conditions; yet it also retains its validity insofar as it responds to specific problems internal to such conditions. As an example, Gordon cites ‘the pursuit of happiness’: a concept that emerged out of the Enlightenment value of autonomous individuality, yet one which clashes with the Enlightenment insistence on ‘the moral necessities of labour’ and ‘capitalist work ethic’. It is precisely such contradictions, he affirms, which provide a basis for immanent critique.

Having set out these conceptual coordinates, Gordon goes on to assess the theoretical and practical dimensions of Adorno’s materialism – which draws on the Marxist tradition yet remains fundamentally ‘non-doctrinal’. His basic claim is that Adorno follows Marx in identifying ‘the locus of all human fulfilment’ in ‘our this-worldly and sensuous being’, but that he rejects the putatively Marxist understanding of consciousness as ‘purely epiphenomenal to a naturalistic base’. Adorno instead advances a quasi-idealist theory of consciousness according to which the object is indeed ‘constituted’ by the conceptual activity of the subject, but the subject is in turn dependent on the object’s material existence. Embedded in a world of objects, the subject must be understood as an object itself. The upshot is that any consistent notion of mind must recognize its vulnerability to the outside world. There is an inner identity of mental and material life. ‘Happiness’ is not merely an external, bodily requirement; it is an internal standard of mind. The political consequences of this theory are stark, writes Gordon, since one quickly realizes that it is impossible to achieve such happiness ‘within the constraints of a market economy’.

Towards the end of the book, Gordon turns to Adorno’s theory of art and aesthetic experience, aiming to understand his claim that works of art ‘disclose anticipatory fragments of unrealized happiness’. While all cultural objects in capitalist modernity assume the status of commodities, ‘emphatic’ art – or art proper – resists its own exchangeable character by insisting on its particularity and uniqueness. In so doing, artworks – paradigmatically the works of high modernism – assert their intransigent autonomy, obeying not the rules of the market but the rules they give to themselves. Yet, in attempting to withdraw from society, autonomous artworks become meaningful only in relation to what they are striving to negate. They cannot escape their social surroundings, reflecting both the world as it is and the palpable need to transcend it. This is the basis on which Gordon argues that aesthetic experience, for Adorno, is ‘experience of a happiness that would lie beyond the confines of subjectivity’.

Gordon concludes by outlining the implications of Adorno’s materialism for contemporary social criticism. Despite Adorno’s rejection of a secure normative foundation for critical theory, he does not fall prey to ‘total scepticism’, because ‘emphatic thinking’ understands the demand for happiness as manifest in historical experience – however fragmentarily. Hence, while Adorno rejects the idealist project of providing a firm rationalist basis for the norms underlying social critique, he nevertheless espouses a ‘philosophical anthropology’ in which human suffering and our desire for happiness are treated as givens. On this basis, Gordon calls for the rejection of the various anti-humanist trends that are de rigeur in contemporary critical theory. Without such an appeal to the human, he claims, it is impossible to identify a source of normative authority. Philosophy and theory must, Gordon tells us, ‘take instruction from the manifold experiences that beckon to us from the realm of the non-identical’.  

A Precarious Happiness is a landmark account of Adorno’s project, understood as an attempt to identify the normative foundations of materialist critique, which will likely help to reorient the debates surrounding critical theory more broadly. Yet the book suffers from three interconnected limitations. First, Gordon frames the Adornian recovery of the source of normativity as a successful challenge to the rationalist model of social critique advanced by Hegel – who, we are told, ‘seeks the realization of freedom without actually including the realization of happiness in the process’. This prioritization of happiness over freedom, I will argue, leaves the critical theorist with no means to justify their own standpoint, and thus proves unable to defend itself against the charge of arbitrariness. Second, Gordon’s anti-rationalism has implications for his account of immanent critique, which confuses the idea of a critique from the margins of society with a critique of society from within. Finally, Gordon tends to misread Adorno and the Frankfurt School as developing an alternative critique of modernity to that of the Marxist tradition – an interpretation that severs this school of thought from the critical legacy of Hegel. Let’s consider each of these shortcomings in turn.

For Gordon, the chief problem with the idealist tradition lies in its effort to ‘deny the fact of our own dependency on the world and on the material conditions that make our suffering a constant and truly constitutive possibility of being human’. Happiness, not freedom, is held to be the emphatic concept governing human existence. What makes the concept emphatic is that it articulates not what human beings are but what human being ‘proper’ is, or what human beings should be, if we are to live up to our own humanity. Drawing on Honneth’s work on recognition, Gordon shows that Adorno develops an ‘ethics of vulnerability’, according to which we exhibit a basic responsiveness to the suffering and experience of others that is ‘affective’ rather than cognitive in nature. We have a ‘mimetic’ capacity through which, for example, we might experience sympathetic pain when we hear about someone who is injured. Such mimesis is theorized as part of a ‘speculative anthropology’; it is involuntary, extra-mental and ‘in some sense irrational’, stemming from the ‘earliest phase of human history’, before the development of our conceptual and inferential capacities, when our relation to nature was still primarily ‘sympathetic’ rather than instrumental. This mimetic capacity is said to be a ‘precondition’ for the achievement of institutional forms of recognition and belonging in which the emphatic concept of happiness could be realized. What idealism leaves out is precisely this affective and material dimension of human life, which is itself a symptom of the way capitalist modernity neglects and suppresses our need for material fulfillment.

Early in the book, Gordon draws an important distinction between the ‘source’ of normativity and its ‘justification’. ‘Although Adorno is constantly alert to sources of normativity in worldly experience, he is sceptical as to whether these experiential sources admit of rational validation’. On this account, Adorno offers no rational justification for his standpoint because reason under capitalist conditions ‘has lost contact with the material experiences that animate human life and make it worthwhile’. Yet this creates an enormous problem, insofar as Gordon throws the baby (reason) out with the bathwater (the modern dominance of instrumental rationality). If, in articulating a theory or a belief, one takes oneself to have no grounds for one’s belief, one in effect believes without believing. If one has no reason to believe that happiness is the overriding norm of human life, then one has no reason to contest the counterclaim that death or disintegration should be our ‘emphatic concept’. More concerning still, if the project of rational justification is rejected, then there is no way to discriminate between better and worse practices and institutions; one could not explain what such ‘happiness’ amounts to in reality, or why it would be better served by one form of life rather than another. Ultimately, critical theory as a project would be undermined, since its own ideals would be rendered arbitrary. If norms are simply derived from experience (as Gordon’s Adorno suggests) and are not subject to rational justification, then whatever we take to constitute an authoritative norm will be a norm, ‘just so’. If I take fascism to constitute the basis for happiness, there would be no way to contest this claim. Force alone would decide the ostensibly normative order of the world.

This opposition to rational justification is premised on a distorted understanding of the account of reason in German Idealism – in Hegel in particular. At the deepest level, the sharp separation of the source of normativity from its justification means that Gordon’s ‘speculative anthropology’ cannot but beg the question of the ‘immanent concept’ of human life, in two ways. First, the notion of an immanent concept is not metaphysically neutral but depends on a conception of what things are such that they are defined by internal standards. Both Gordon and Adorno treat such concepts as if they are a materialist alternative to the idealist view, as standards which do not merely exist in the mind but are internal to material entities themselves. But such an idea of ‘what things are’ cannot be gotten on the cheap. What the ‘materialists’ merely take for granted, Hegel actually deduces. In his Science of Logic, he goes to great lengths to articulate what would count as a self-consistent, justified understanding of what it means to be: namely, a theory of immanent concepts as what marks objects off as the distinct objects they are.

Second, to pick out the object of Gordon’s ‘speculative anthropology’ requires an account of what it means to be the sort of being that constitutes itself in light of such an immanent concept. As Hegel shows, such an account must exploit a non-empirical or logical distinction between the ‘living’ and the ‘non-living’. It is only with the emergence of organic life, Hegel contends, that immanent concepts arise in the world. The organism is an entity that has itself as its own end: a fox, for example, acts to maintain itself as a fox, while an inanimate entity like a stone will do nothing to stave off its erosion. Whereas a fox can die, a stone can only be further and further divided. The internal standard or immanent concept of a fox is furnished by its evolved species form. A fox with a heart defect will be less able to reproduce not only the species but also itself, thereby falling below its immanent concept.

Such self-maintenance is not the same thing as self-preservation, however, which consists in the purely negative end of avoiding death, not the positive internal end of flourishing (eudaimonia). While self-preservation is a merely instrumental activity (a fox does not want to be running away from a coyote or fighting off disease), self-maintenance comprises the full spectrum of species activities – like playing – which are done for their own sake. This distinction is ignored by both Gordon and Adorno. In an animal’s aggressive struggle for self-preservation (kill or be killed), Adorno locates the original model of human reason, which he consistently conflates with instrumental reason (dominate or be dominated). Hegel, on the other hand, refers to the organic drive to self-maintenance as an ‘objective idealism’ (since species-concepts do not exist in the head but in the world) and as the proto-form of human reason itself: one which should not be elided with the impulse to dominate.

This brings us to the question of the human animal, and what Gordon rightly calls the ‘demand for happiness or flourishing’. What distinguishes humans from other animals is that we understand our ends as ends, and thus are always in the grip of the question of what we ought to do (what we have reason to do). Unlike the fox, we are always susceptible to a demand for justification. ‘Why are you teaching that book on critical theory?’, one might ask. ‘Because it best illuminates our historical situation.’ To which one might respond: ‘But it fails to do justice to this or that aspect of our form of life.’ It is because we are always responsive to reasons, when enacting our ends, that these ends are subject to debate and revision. What counts as flourishing for animals like us is historically revisable on the basis of rational contestation. And what ultimately determines whether some historical conception of flourishing is ‘really’ flourishing hinges on two factors: whether we can mutually endorse our reasons for sustaining it, and whether we can regard it as freely legislated by us, rather than imposed from without.

Far from ‘denying the fact of our own dependency on the world’, as Gordon claims, Hegel deduces that any rational knower must be a living, embodied and vulnerable being, one that maintains its organic form through its historical and institutional relations with others. Hegel thereby develops what could be described as a constitutive model of rationality, where reason cannot be separated from our biological nature, because we cannot maintain ourselves as living beings except through social and historical exercises of reason. Despite their critique of reason as effecting a split between body and mind, the material and the conceptual, it is Gordon and Adorno themselves who end up endorsing such a split.

They conceive of mimesis as ‘a bodily impulse’ that is ‘involuntary and irrational’ and that is therefore outside of reason and ‘the centralizing authority of consciousness’. Yet if mimesis is supposed to enable an undistorted experience of objects, then the impulse cannot lie outside of consciousness and reason. Otherwise, there would be no way for the object of experience to exhibit unity (since existing as this and not that necessarily requires concepts), or for the experience itself to count as mine. Children who learn to use cutlery by imitating their parents are not just subject to an impulse; they are beginning to give themselves a rule for the action of eating. The irony, then, is that the dualist split between reason and sensibility lies not with Hegel but with his avowed materialist critics. Hegel establishes that reason is not opposed to materiality and desire but that rationality is itself a distinctly social, institutional and historical way of living. No happiness, in other words, without freedom, and no freedom without happiness. This is the basic Hegelian insight which Gordon and Adorno have distorted into its opposite.

If Gordon’s anti-rationalist anthropologism is informed to a large degree by Adorno’s fatal misreading of the Hegelian alternative, A Precarious Happiness is nevertheless right to demonstrate that Adorno is not a ‘negativist’ and to develop a positive criterion of flourishing to ground his procedure of immanent critique. But one of Gordon’s key examples of immanent critique strikes me as deeply confused – and telling of the anti-rationalism underpinning the Adornian project as a whole. At several points throughout the book, Gordon cites Adorno’s discussions of the ‘purposeless activity’ of children as a site of resistance to the dominance of the commodity form and of exchange value over use value. For children, trucks and cars are emancipated from their everyday function and turned into toys, which the ‘instrumentalist imperative’ cannot infect. Gordon gives three criteria for the critical potential of children’s toys: marginality, negativity and anticipation. Because toys are purposeless, they exist at the margins of the prevailing social order and exemplify ways of being that have been suppressed; by extension, they negate the logic of exchange and anticipate a different social order in which such ways of being are redeemed.

But here we encounter an immediate difficulty. The function of a truck – the internal standard or immanent concept by virtue of which a good truck can be distinguished from a bad one – lies precisely on the side of use, not exchange. It is only when objects designed to satisfy human needs are assimilated by the profit motive that their function becomes external and ‘instrumentalist’. Moreover, if children’s games truly lie outside the dominant order and do not embody exchange, then surely they represent an opportunity not for an immanent critique but for a transcendent one – via the stipulated value of ‘purposelessness’. The idea of a critique of society from the standpoint of those who have not yet been ‘corrupted’ is of course an old one, evoking the Rousseau of Emile. But this is a resolutely romantic form of critique that does not contest society on its own terms. Instead, it turns away from society altogether – from the space of reasons, purposes, ends. A truly immanent critique of children’s toys would have to take as its starting point the functions that toys help children to learn, and their deformation by the capitalist imperative of accumulation. The ‘promise’ of the toy truck lies in the way it imaginatively projects possibilities of travel and transport and thereby begins to initiate the child into our form of life, while the ‘ideology’ of the truck lies in its hasty design and cheap plastic materials – its markers of the profit motive – which contradict its playful yet pedagogical function.

The limits of A Precarious Happiness sketched so far are Adorno’s own. But there is a further shortcoming that is Gordon’s alone, and which arises not from the way he replicates Adorno’s thought but in a key misrepresentation of it: namely, his distortion of Adorno’s Marxism. According to Gordon, by the end of the 1920s the members of the Institute for Social Research had suffered a ‘loss of confidence in a united and revolutionary working class’ and, under Horkheimer’s stewardship, broke with their prior Marxist agenda. What was meant to take its place, Gordon argues, was a new, ‘non-doctrinal’ materialism and critique of bourgeois modernity. It is of course true that Adorno criticizes Marx in several places, yet here Gordon tends to conflate Marxism with the reductive materialism of the Eastern bloc, while failing to take note of two of the most significant attestations to Adorno’s continued commitment to a specifically Marxist analysis of capitalist modernity.

First, in Adorno’s 1964 lecture Philosophical Elements of a Theory of Society, he provides an account of the ‘integration’ of the proletariat into bourgeois society over the course of the twentieth century. The drastic increase in workers’ collective bargaining power via trade unions abated the worst excesses of the nineteenth-century factory system. In turn, the sharp discrepancy in quality of life between proletariat and bourgeoisie began to diminish. Workers shed the quality of – in Adorno’s phrase – ‘social extraterritoriality’. Gordon cites this argument to claim that Adorno suffered a ‘loss of confidence’ in the proletariat and that he must therefore be understood as a materialist as opposed to a Marxist proper. But while there is no doubt that Adorno saw the ‘bourgeoisification’ of the proletariat as having blunted class consciousness, he also emphasized that the proletariat must be defined ‘objectively, by its position in relation to the means of production – by being cut off from control of the means of production’. Even if the proletariat is no longer aware of itself as the class responsible for the production of value, objectively it continues to play this role. There is thus a fundamental analytic distinction, neglected by Gordon, between the proletariat for itself and the proletariat in itself. It is only because of the persistence of the latter that an immanent critique of modernity – in which the concepts of freedom and equality are shown to stand in contradiction with the domination and exploitation that they ultimately license – remains possible.

This brings us to the second attestation to Adorno’s Marxism. In a recorded conversation between Adorno and Horkheimer from March 1956, the two thinkers contemplate what it would take, under current conditions, to turn socialism into something more than just a utopian dream. The theory of the objective reality of the proletariat, they both claim, must provide a new basis for the revitalization of class consciousness. Their proposal?

Horkheimer: . . . the re-establishment of a socialist party.

Adorno: With a strictly Leninist manifesto.

Such a Leninist party would be an apparatus for educating workers about the capitalist form of their lives and critically reflecting on what must be done, here and now, to achieve emancipation. Or, to put it in Hegelian terms, the party would be the vehicle for critical reflection on what we have reason to do, given that ultimate unrealized immanent concept, the principle of flourishing for animals like us: freedom.

A welcome attempt to provide a much-needed, normative foundation for critical theory, A Precarious Happiness ends up undermining its own philosophical aims through its neglect of Adorno’s Marxism. If we fail to heed Adorno’s insistence that the proletariat lives on ‘in itself’, we cannot grasp our distinctly capitalist social form. In turn, emancipatory politics would lack a determinate orientation: emancipation from what? The same point applies to Gordon’s anti-Hegelianism. Without Hegel’s ‘logical’ or rational grounding of the criteria for flourishing, there will be no basis for defending or justifying a possible post-capitalist social form. Critique without reason, it turns out, is no critique at all.

Read on: Peter Dews, ‘Adorno, Poststructuralism and the Critique of Identity’, NLR I/157.