Minima Moralia by Theodor AdornoReview by: Marc R. ToolJournal of Economic Issues, Vol. 14, No. 1, Methodology in Economics. Symposium Issue: PartII (Mar., 1980), pp. 236-238Published by: Association for Evolutionary EconomicsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4224913 .

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236 Book Reviews

By summarizing the current literature on the issue, Winch has laid a good foundation for an inquiry into the somewhat obscure and perhaps inconsistent views Smith held regarding political and economic motiva- tions and the appropriate policies deducible from these appraisals.

S. TODD LOWRY Washington and Lee University

MINIMA MORALIA. By Theodor A dorno. London: NLB, 1974 (New York: Schocken Books, 1978). Pp. 251. $11.95.

Minima Moralia is a wide-ranging compendium of philosophic observa- tions, reflections, and commentaries written by Theodor Adorno in the period 1945-1947. As most are aware, Adorno was, until his death in 1969, a distinguished member of the Frankfurt school of Marxists. He was a refugee scholar from Germany in New York and Los Angeles during World War II. American social scientists will recall his extensive contribu- tions to a 1950 study of social discrimination, especially anti-Semitism, entitled The Authoritarian Personality. He returned to West Germany after the war to head the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt.

Minima Moralia (the title has Aristotelian roots) consists of one hun- dred and fifty terse, pungent, and incisive philosophic distillations ranging in length from half a page to four or five pages. Drawing on the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology, politics, economics, and aesthetics, Adorno exhibits a distinctive and consistent recourse to Marxian dialec- tics. This dialectical mode undergirds and structures the "moralistic irony" of Adorno's comments on questions and issues of economic deprivation, sexual discrimination, political behavior, family relations, artistic endeav- ors (painting, film making, musical compositions, architectural design), occult beliefs, consumer practices, emigrant status, fascistic ideas, bour- geois culture, views of death, alternative perspectives, and the like. The envisioned universality of philosophic interest and the claimed generality and sufficiency of dialectical inquiry are made repeatedly manifest.

Adorno frequently demonstrates his excellent literary capacity to for- mulate maxims, epigrams, and aphorisms. The following are examples:

In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the out- come was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a veg- etable and it was already a dream.

In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.

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Book Reviews 237

The noiseless din that we have long known in dreams, booms at us in wak- ing hours from newspaper headlines.

In many people it is already an impertinence to say "I."

The basest person is capable of perceiving the weaknesses of the greatest, the most stupid, the errors in the thought of the most intelligent.

The principle of human domination, in becoming absolute, has turned its point against man as the absolute object, and psychology has collaborated in sharpening that point.

The appeal to reason invariably occurs most promptly in apologies for unreason.

Anti-Semitism is the rumour [sic] about the Jews.

The decay of the workers' movement is corroborated by the official opti- mism of its adherents.

The assumption that thought profits from the decay of the emotions, or even that it remains unaffected, is itself an expression of the process of stupefaction.

Anyone who has once made it his concern to judge people's suitability sees those judged, by a kind of technological necessity, as insiders or out- siders, as belonging or alien to the race, as accomplices or victims.

Only a crippled mind needs self-hatred in order to demonstrate its intel- lectual essence-untruth-by the size of its biceps.

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.

Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without pro- voking strength.

But the unifying theme which ties these divergent philosophic sardoni- cisms together is Adorno's critique of the mores and morality of a mature capitalist culture. It is the world of the bourgeois society which provides the corpus on which Adorno's dialectically incisive and ironic literary and analytical skills are exercised. He, as does Herbert Marcuse, attacks the shallow consumerism of late capitalist orders. He is wary of capitalist em- phases on ownership, production, industry, functionalism, and the pursuit of pecuniary ends. He connects the ills of the world (sexism, war, fascism, alienation, and so forth) to the bourgeois culture. He laments the treat- ment of persons as objects deprived of their humanity and as subjects of

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238 Book Reviews

the discretion of others. He urges recourse to what he would define as objective knowledge.

In Adorno's pervasive attack on fascist beliefs, his denigration of all that demeans or destroys people and their distinctive human traits, his cele- bration of the life of the mind, his appeal to reason and evidence in lieu of unreason and psychological manipulation, his impatience with the shallow and the trivial in experience, and his integrative efforts as a philosopher he can, of course, find much support among institutionalists and many others.

But his almost total deference to dialectics, as with other Marxists, car- ries the construct of conflictual connections beyond its sometime descrip- tive relevance into an exclusive prescriptive mode of inquiry. Accordingly, both the style and content of Adorno's reflections suffer from the forced juxtaposition of contradictory ideas, persons, and things. The dialectic serves his purposes of irony and sardonic observation very well, of course, but other sorts of observation also enhance comprehension of complex social phenomena. Institutionalists are not likely to find a more sophisticated and insightful use of the dialectic than that provided by Adorno. For most, it will at least afford an opportunity for critical assess- ment of the relevance and analytic consequences of having recourse to the Marxist dialectical mode of inquiry; for some it will provide a superior and sobering intellectual assessment of the late capitalist order. The task for any reader will be finally to decide what weight and credibility to give the often conjectural, necessarily normative, dialectically formed, conceptual inversions of Adorno's analysis. It is a provocative book. It is good to have now available in English this 1951 classic.

MARC R. TOOL California State University,

Sacramento

RESEARCH IN CORPORATE SOCIAL PERFORMANCE AND POLICY. Volume I. Edited by Lee E. Preston. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1978. Pp. ix, 291. $25.00.

This is the first volume of a projected annual compilation of research in the relations between the corporation and society. It contains eleven essays which attempt to develop a framework for further research. Not all are of interest to institutional economists, nor are all of high quality. Hence, this review will select only a few for discussion.

The essay by S. Prakash Sethi is of genuine interest. Sethi compares the

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