Minima Moralia

Introduction

Adorno wrote these 153 aphorisms between 1944 and 1947 in American exile and dedicated them to Horkheimer; the book appeared in Frankfurt in 1951. The subtitle, “Reflections from Damaged Life”, names the method: in the smallest details of private life – housing, gifts, manners, love, tact – the state of the whole society can be read. One of the best-known aphorisms concludes that wrong life cannot be lived rightly. The book draws on the experience of exile and of the destruction of European Jewry and was widely read in post-war Germany; its condensed style became a model for later essayistic social criticism.

More works by Theodor W. Adorno

• 1944Dialectic of Enlightenment
• 1964The Jargon of Authenticity
• 1966Negative Dialectics