Book Review: Critique of Forms of Life, by Rahel Jaeggi

• Published date: 01 February 2021
• Author: Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo
• Date: 01 February 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720947349
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(1) 134 –158

© The Author(s) 2020

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Book Reviews

Critique of Forms of Life, by Rahel Jaeggi, trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2018, xvii + 395 pp.

Reviewed by: Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, Department of Political Science, Rutgers

University-Newark, Newark, NJ, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591720947349

1

Rahel Jaeggi’s outstanding Critique of Forms of Life constitutes the most

formidable of several recent efforts within Frankfurt School Critical Theory

to revitalize its critical import.1 Author of a commanding monograph uphold-

ing the critical import of a reconstructed concept of “alienation,” Jaeggi

brings considerable intellectual gifts—lively philosophical prose, sociologi-

cal sense, conceptual acuteness—to rework the Hegelian legacy in critical

theory through an intriguing recasting of the notion “forms of life” that sem-

inally touches upon important questions that bear directly on the concerns of

political theorists committed to genuine critique. The work of an original

mind, Critique of Life Forms vindicates an unfeigned critical vocation.

Effortlessly moving across the analytical/continental divide, Jaeggi mobi-

lizes, and originally builds upon, a vast philosophical and theoretical schol-

arship. Philosophically, she ranges from critical theory, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl

Marx, and Raymond Geuss to John Dewey, Hilary Putnam, Charles Taylor,

Alasdair MacIntyre, Wilfrid Sellars, and Robert Brandom to reconceive

Hegel’s notion of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit) and thus open up a new set of

questions beyond the commonplaces found in mainstream discussions of

this foundational Hegelian notion. Present in Frankfurt School Critical

Theory as early as Horkheimer’s foundational essay, “Traditional and

Critical Theory,” Jaeggi can rightfully claim to be drawing out the critical

import of a central idea of critical theory that had been hitherto either ignored

or undertheorized.

A book of this range and complexity defies easy summary, and reasons

of space preclude doing justice to the richness found in it. Yet without too

much simplification one can identify three key contributions: a coruscating

elucidation of the critical import of “forms of life”; an original account of

947349PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720947349Political TheoryBook Reviews

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