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Peter E. Gordon

Resident Faculty & Seminar Co-chair

Europe is more than its political history; it is also a philosophical canon – a repository of contested ideals and critical practices that express our yearning for a more enlightened, more inclusive humanity.

Peter E. Gordon

Resident Faculty & Seminar Co-chair

Biography

Peter E. Gordon

Peter Gordon is Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University and resident faculty at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES), where he co-chairs the Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History. He is also a faculty affiliate in the department of Germanic languages and literatures as well as the department of philosophy. Gordon works chiefly at the intersection of modern European intellectual history and continental philosophy. His most recent book, Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization (Yale University Press, 2020), is based on the Franz Rosenzweig Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought that Gordon presented at Yale University. His forthcoming book Prekäres Glück: Adorno über Negativität und Normativität will be published in German by Suhrkamp Verlag. The English edition, A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity will be published in January 2024 by University of Chicago Press.

Gordon's previous books include Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (2003); The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (2007); The Modernist Imagination: Essays in Critical Theory and Intellectual History (2008); Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (2010); Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy (2013); and Adorno and Existence (2016). His book Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos was awarded the 2010 Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society. In 2005 he received the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Affiliations

  • Amabel B. James Professor of History, Harvard University
  • Resident Faculty & Seminar Co-chair, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
  • Faculty Affiliate, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
  • Faculty Affiliate, Department of Philosophy, Harvard University

Recent Books

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Theodor W. Adorno's death in 1969, Peter Gordon delivered the Adorno Vorlesungen (Adorno Lectures) at the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt in June 2019/ The theme of this three-part lecture series was "Adorno and the Sources of Normativity." The lectures were widely reviewed in the German press, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (see article here).

The collection of these lectures has been published in German by the Suhrkamp Verlag under the title Prekäres Glück: Adorno über Negativität und Normativität. The English translation was recently published by The Chicago University Press entitled A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity.

“Gordon’s confidently gripping and at the same time persistently subtle interpretation brings a new tone to the debate about Adorno’s negativism. Engaging with Adorno’s lectures, Gordon shows how the negative dialectic, though eluding direct access to statements about the ‘good life,’ means to spell out the contours of a ‘right’ life. Within the enchanted bounds of a distorted whole, Adorno searches for traces of a failed happiness. From the despairing criticism of the world’s hopeless condition, the Hegelian nonetheless discerns a transcending impulse of hope that points far beyond the Kantian encouragement to use our rational freedom.”

– Jürgen Habermas

"Adorno is no theorist of total darkness, no Mephistopheles.

He had hope."


– Peter E. Gordon, Adorno Vorlesungen, June 2019.

Recent Collections

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)

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