Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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65 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An underrated and under-discussed masterpiece, June 17, 1999
Although the Frankfurt School enjoyed some popularity in the US during the 1960s, its greatest writer never gained a following. Read this book and you may understand why: Adorno's thought is dense, allusive, and difficult to assimilate. It assumes quite some background in European, and especially German, intellectual history.The right reader, however, will find Minima Moralia a tightly written, polished masterpiece. It is essentially a series of aphorisms in the style of Nietzsche. Adorno blends sharp observations about daily life in the 20th century with choice gleanings from philosophy, literature and history. The result is a unique work of cultural criticism that defies characterization or summary. Almost every sentence of Minima Moralia contains a devastating insight into modern culture. Must reading for anyone who cares about Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, and all related strands of thought.
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32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
i am speechless..., May 26, 2000
...when it comes to praising this book. as a european refugee in this country, i feel that adorno's lucidity is almost uncanny. many times i read and reread one page, enjoying and deeply respecting his wisdom and intellectual courage, shocked by his insight. it is not an easy reading and it is mostly painful...but very, very rewarding. i love books more than anything, and i spend all my money and time on them, but until now i have not read anything comparable. the only other book i know of that offers such challenge and such solace is le mythe de sisyphe by camus. by the way, i hope the english translation is good, but i recommend to read it in german.
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62 of 72 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A callenging, flawed thinker reflects a flawed world., July 11, 2003
Like Noam Chomsky, Theodor Adorno is one of those thinkers whose exposures of what society keeps hidden are so antithetical to received opinion, that they are either ignored or attacked by those who evade the actual issues at hand. While Chomsky uncovers hypocrisy and deception in international politics, Adorno cuts to the heart of alienated modern subjectivity, exploring the paradoxes and delusions of a world that most people imagine couldn't be otherwise. While his writing always carries a faint glimmer of hope that "things could be different", Adorno is largely pessimistic about the possibility of true freedom and reconciliation (in a Marxist sense) under the often absurd conditions of modern life. Now, this doesn't mean that he subjects "society" to vicious attack. On the contrary (and again, like Chomsky), Adorno speaks with sobriety and erudition. He's not afraid to interogate the customs and habits that are woven into the very fabric of modern institutions, charting their evolution and pointing out the relatively late development of many types of human interaction that are ordinarily dismissed as human nature, if thought of at all.
Adorno's dense, challenging prose can be difficult to digest in large portions. I made the mistake of beginning my exploration of his work with "Aesthetic Theory", which consists of 250 pages of undiluted thought, and no chapter divisions. The aphoristic collection of ruminations that is "Minima Moralia" is a much better introduction to this twists and turns of Adorno's thinking. As always, he uncondescendingly offers faithful transcriptions of his very thought processes, making things both difficult for the lazy reader, and more revealing to attentive readers able to hug the sharp corners at accelerated mental speeds. Adorno's critique centers on the alienation produced by commodity culture, where everything is reduced to a price tag, the complementary "administered" world, where all aspects of modern existence are mediated by government beaurocracy, and the shallow "culture industry" that dispenses the bread and circuses of corporate pop culture to superficially fill the void at the center of a "free" existence enslaved to capital. This book will hit some uncomfortable nerves, and sections here have the same potential to change one's life as David Edwards' "Burning All Illusions", a more psychological/political attack on the underlying societal assumptions that are uncritically accepted as given. However, unlike Edwards, Adorno sees no way out of the vast prison of alienation that precariously butresses the pervasive false consciousness of the modern subject. Potential avenues of escape are quickly dismissed as illusory products of man's false sense of freedom. Edwards doesn't pull any punches in his emphasis on the difficulty of escaping the myriad mental bonds of contemporary existence, but at least he pushes the reader to seek a better life beyond the superficial trappings that have all but smothered our apprehension of the big picture of human history. Adorno resigns himself to the small consolation of having diagnosed the sickness, while advising a low-key existence, afloat in a sea that is, nevertheless, recognized for its falsehood.
Ultimately, Adorno was a vital critic of what often goes unconsidered, not to mention a razor-sharp philosophical mind. While a master of unmasking the falsity of so-called first principles, he isn't without his own ideological givens: He relies far too much on the dialectical method of Hegel and Marx. Still, within the experimental controls provided by his subtly dogmatic ideological undergirding, Adorno provides ample food for thought. The hardline intellectual presentation requires the reader to operate at a level conducive to critical thinking, not only in relation to society, but in relation to
Adorno's thought itself.
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