Peter E. Gordon, Adorno and Existence is reviewed at NDPR.

Peter Gordon addresses a much-neglected topic in the complex intellectual history of the Frankfurt School. He traces Adorno’s lifelong engagement with existentialism and concludes that Adorno owes more to existentialism than usually meets the eye. What underlies Adorno’s sustained critique of this philosophical tradition, Gordon claims, is the fact that Adorno utilizes existentialism and its radical conception of subjectivity as a foil to develop his own materialism.