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- Title
Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia1.
- Authors
Martyn, David
- Abstract
Readers of Adorno’s Minima Moralia have often asked and debated how this collection of aphorisms, many of which record Adorno’s personal experiences with American society, can claim any degree of objective or scientific validity. This article finds an answer to this perennial question in the peculiar way the book employs the anecdotal as a mode of presenting “actual experience.” After reviewing Adorno’s attitude toward the use of empirical methods in social research, the article contrasts the treatment of anecdotes in Adorno’s contributions to The Authoritarian Personality, an empirical study published in 1950, with his use of fragmentary anecdotal elements – brief descriptions of trivial occurrences, vignettes, highly condensed mini-narratives – in the Minima Moralia. I argue that these “anecdotal remains” constitute a form of empiricism. Seeing them as such allows us to better understand Adorno’s puzzling acknowledgment of empirical research as a needed corrective to traditional philosophy.
- Subjects
AMERICA; AUTHORITARIAN personality; SOCIAL science research; EMPIRICISM; EMPIRICAL research; VIGNETTES; ANECDOTES
- Publication
Colloquia Germanica, 2023, Vol 56, Issue 2/3, p197
- ISSN
0010-1338
- Publication type
Article