Peter E. Gordon is the Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University and a resident faculty member at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES), where he chairs the Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History and the Questions of Democracy and Fascism Lecture Series. Gordon is a critical theorist and an historian of modern European philosophy and social thought, specializing in Frankfurt School critical theory, phenomenology, existentialism, and Western Marxism. He has published major works on Heidegger, the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas, and Theodor W. Adorno.
In June, 2019, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Theodor W. Adorno's death in 1969, Gordon delivered the Adorno Vorlesungen at the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, on the theme, "Adorno and the Sources of Normativity." The lectures, widely reviewed in the German press, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, are currently available online from the Institut für Sozialforschung, and has been recently published in German as Prekäres Glück: Adorno und die Quellen der Normativität (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2023) and also in English (University of Chicago Press, 2024) as A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity.
Gordon's forthcoming book "Max Weber at 100 - Legacies and Prospects" (co-authored with Joshua Derman) is slated for publication by Oxford University Press in December 2024. Gordon has received numerous awards and recognitions for his previous books. They include Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (University of California Press, 2003); The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2007); The Modernist Imagination: Essays in Critical Theory and Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press, 2008); Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Harvard University Press, 2010); Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy (Princeton University Press, 2013); Adorno and Existence (Harvard University Press, 2016); and Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization (Yale University Press, 2020) which is based on lectures he gave at Yale University. He is also co-author of the book, Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory (Chicago University Press, 2018) which also includes chapters by Wendy Brown and Max Pensky.
Fall Course:
Seminar on Reading Marx (Hist 2323)
The Precarious Happiness of Theodor Adorno, Institute of Intellectual History, University of St. Andrews (Summer 2024)
A Precarious Happiness – Peter E. Gordon on the Sources of Normativity in Adorno, Interview with Marvin Ester, Kristische Theorie Berlin (June 2024)
Precarious Happiness – Peter E. Gordon in conversation with Rahel Jaeggi and Thomas Khurana, Center for Post-Kantian Philosophy (June 3, 2024)
Gordon, Peter, Hammer Espen, and Axel Honneth. Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School. (Routledge, 2019)
Gordon, Peter, Espen Hammer, and Max Pensky. A Companion to Adorno. (Wiley Blackwell, 2020)
Adorno, Theodor W., and Peter Gordon. Introduction. In Authoritarian Personality. (Verso Books, 2019)
