.Few 20th-century thinkers have cultivated a reputation for pessimism like that of Theodor Adorno His very vision of modern society, some might have you believe, is one of absolute despair. The famed leader of the Frankfurt School of critical theory once quipped, “Every image of humanity, other than the negative one, is ideology.” Yet in his book A Precarious Happiness, the Harvard intellectual historian Peter Gordon argues that readings of Adorno’s work that cast him as a thoroughgoing pessimist or skeptic are fundamentally misguided; instead, Gordon suggests, Adorno’s project is oriented toward a conception of human happiness and flourishing in a broken world. Thus, even as Adorno stresses how damaged the world is, happiness can nevertheless be pursued in it—hence the precarious nature of Adorno’s conception of the good life.

The Nation spoke with Gordon about Adorno’s conception of happiness, his thinking about jazz and classical music, his relationship with the Frankfurt School, and the future of critical theory.