Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality
Christopher Vials
IN THE EARLY post-World War II years, antifascism’s most intricate, intersectional analysis of the political right came from a highly influential work within the academic social sciences: The Authoritarian Personality (1950, reissued 1982), by Theodor Adorno and University of California-Berkeley psychologists Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson and Nevitt Sanford. [For background on Adorno’s life and work, see the essay in “The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,” http://www.iep.utm.edu/adorno/ — ed.]
The book is most remembered for its development of an “F Scale,” a quantifiable measure of an individual’s susceptibility to fascism, gleaned from survey questions and interviews. According to Adorno et al, if you strongly agreed with the following statements, you might not be a fascist right now, but you would be the kind of person who would probably fall for a fascist demagogue when one came calling:
• There is too much emphasis in college on intellectual and theoretical topics, not enough emphasis on practical matters and on the homely virtues of living.
• Homosexuality is a particularly rotten form of delinquency and ought to be severely punished.
• Human nature being what it is, there will always be war and conflict.
• There are some things too intimate or personal to talk about even with one’s closest friends.
• There are some activities so flagrantly un-American that, when responsible officials won’t take the proper steps, the wide-awake citizen should take the law into his own hands.
• No insult to our honor should ever go unpunished.
• Every person should have a deep faith in some supernatural force higher than himself to which he gives total allegiance and whose decisions he does not question.
• Too many people today are living in an unnatural, soft way; we should return to the fundamentals, to a more red-blooded, active way of life.(1)
What Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford were looking for in such questions was not a conscious, well-formulated fascist politics among their interview subjects. Rather, they were trying to pinpoint an underlying set of pre-political personality traits that formed the wellsprings of fascist support.
The authors identified the core of the “authoritarian personality” — the thing they tried to draw out through their surveys — with the following main features: conventionalism (“rigid adherence to middle class values”); authoritarian submission (“uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the ingroup”); authoritarian aggression (a desire to punish those who transgress conventional values); anti-intraception (a rejection of imaginative, reflective, or empathetic people); superstition and stereotypy (“the belief in mystical determinates of the individual’s fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories”); power and toughness (“preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension”); projectivity (“the disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world”), and sex (“exaggerated concern with sexual ‘goings-on’”).(2)
A few of the traits on their list may seem dated in the 21st century — for instance, the “exaggerated concern with sexual goings-on” may no longer apply following the transformation of Western cultures by consumerism, feminism, and the LGBTQ movements. Be that as it may, it is precisely the hunt for an underlying fascist personality that makes this book so valuable at the present conjuncture.
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