SOURCE: “Dr. Adorno's Bag of Tricks,” in Encounter, Vol. 47, No. 4, October, 1976, pp. 67-76.

In the following essay, Martin reviews Minima Moralia, finding the book intriguing even though he disagrees with many of Adorno's assertions.

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace.

—Matthew Arnold

Those qualified to judge are inclined to regard T. W. Adorno's Minima Moralia¹ as the masterwork of the Frankfurt School. Certainly it illustrates one of that School's cardinal tenets: a rejection of over-arching system. An author who claims that “the whole is the untrue” probably represents his position best by collections of fragments. The Minima Moralia is fragmented in the way Pascal's Pensées is fragmented; and, as with Pascal, one suspects that a work which brought all the bits and pieces into a rounded system would result in distortion. Adorno's work is about multiple distortion, and you can only attack multiple distortion...