Two New Interpretations of Adorno: Pippin and Honneth

The recent works of Robert B. Pippin and Axel Honneth offer two distinct revisions on the thought and legacy of Theodor W. Adorno for contemporary political philosophy. Their reinterpretations mark an important shift for the tradition of critical theory as it moves from what Honneth has labeled the “negativist form of social critique” – which flowed from a particular reading of Adorno’s work, most notably in French post-structuralism – towards new horizons.1 In this review essay, I contend that Pippin and Honneth offer compatible, yet distinct, views on Adorno and offer an alternative trajectory for the future developments of critical theory. On the one hand, Pippin, through the work of Adorno, offers a cogent defense of realizing the ideal of bourgeois freedom for achieving the self-conscious, active, self-determining subject.2 On the other, Honneth has reinterpreted Adorno’s thought as a means to ground critical theory’s type of normative social theorizing and its concern with human emancipation in existing social reality. Pippin’s The Persistence of Subjectivity forms part of the growing trend amongst scholars to re-explore and critically assess the Kantian and Hegelian legacy in social theory and political philosophy. Much of this book has been published previously – as has Honneth’s Disrespect – but it is only here that Pippin comprehensively examines what he calls the highest values of the “modern West,” the idea of bourgeois philosophy.3 For Pippin, what lies at the heart of this ideal is a philosophy of freedom that looks to how individuals may direct the course of their own lives as independent, rational and self-reflective beings. Today, “bourgeois” denotes images of self-indulgent hedonism and connotes a form of egoism, a “well-organised selfishness” and “cultural crudity.”4 Pippin illustrates that post-Hegelian thought has maintained a profound suspicion of the claims of bourgeois philosophy and the idea of individuals as self-determining centers of causal agency. Yet for Pippin, the problem is not that the “‘bourgeois’ picture” is false but that it is “simply ‘incomplete’” and should therefore not be rejected but “properly ‘realised.’”5 The problem that Pippin grapples with is the post-Kantian denial of the ontological claim and hostile rejection of the potential for a self-conscious, active, self-determining subject elsewhere described as the free and rational individual subject.6 He also deals with the loss of the ideal of freedom that has accompanied this rejection. Pippin argues that the attempt to jettison the commitment to a bourgeois subject has involved throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater – the loss of the aspiration for a free, self-determining life.7 For Pippin, the most important implication of bourgeois freedom is the idea of natural right, that