Theoretical and methodological foundations of the authoritarian personality (original) (raw)
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The Authoritarian Character Revisited: Genesis and Key Concepts
Symposion: Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences, 2024
This paper revisits the conceptual history of the early Frankfurt School's investigations into the authoritarian character, the set of sadomasochistic character traits that dispose an individual or group to seek their own domination. This research project, which produced Fromm's Studies on Authority and Family and Horkheimer's Egoism and Freedom Movements in 1936 and ended in 1939 with Fromm's expulsion from the Frankfurt School, is generally held to have been a theoretically-unproductive and abortive endeavour. We dispute such a reading by reconstructing the key concepts and methods of this research project, and demonstrating its breadth and coherence. In so doing we illustrate the centrality of Fromm's contribution to the Frankfurt School early work on authority and indicate that the proper point of origin for those seeking to grasp the Frankfurt School's research on the authoritarian character is 1930, the year in which Fromm joined the Frankfurt School.
The Authoritarian Personality and Its Discontents
Over a year after the election of Donald Trump, countless comparisons have been made between our populist moment and the rise of authoritarianism and fascism in twentieth-century Europe. Placing even greater stress on this tenuous analogy, many of Trump’s critics have turned to analysis of these phenomena by German-Jewish émigré intellectuals, notably Hannah Arendt and members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. In this flurry of citation, critics have tended to elide deep rifts between these German traditions, even as the theories invoked in fact support two distinct and opposing interpretations. The first of these we might call the anti-tyranny camp (a darling of liberal publications) the faces of which are the historian Timothy Snyder (Yale University) and his theorist of choice, Hannah Arendt. The alternative is what we might call the anti-capitalist camp. It is here we find the Frankfurt School, which brings together an analysis of fascism with anti-capitalist critique. Conflicting temporalities underlie these divergent approaches: anti-tyrannists characterize Trump as a historical rupture, a deviation from history as usual, while for anti-capitalists he is a historical continuity, a product of history as usual. I will make the case that it is the latter tradition, as distinct from an Arendtian fixation on totalitarianism, that best articulates a critical synthesis of historical precedent and contemporary threat.
Trump and the Authoritarian Personality
Recent atrocities like the assassination of British MP Jo Cox by a Neo-Nazi who opposed her support for maintaining England's membership in the European Union and the Orlando shooting where prominently hispanic LGBTQ people were gunned down with a legally purchased assault weapon for their sexual orientation, it is getting harder to repress and ignore violent extremists in the world. Alienation and extremism which are at the root of these incidents, is similarly behind the support of the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump. Donald Trump channels this energy in his speeches and continues to fuel more extremism with his discourse of fear and hate targeting anyone who he deems to be an outsider, meaning not American born WASP. Even though he is popular enough to become the GOP frontrunner for President, support for Trump is paradoxical and a classic example of the Orwellian notion of doublethink: supporting two contradictory points of view. Even though mainly white working class voters support him, he would unlikely help them with their problems. In reality, Trump is merely an agitator. He plays into his supporter's fears, offering magic solutions and providing them with a space to let out their rage toward outsiders. Psychoanalysis is a theoretical tool which emerged to understand the irrational aspects of the human mind at the end of the 19 th century by Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis was not only used by governments to support docility of the masses, they were also expanded on by the Frankfurt School during World War II to describe the rise of the authoritarian personality. By using a social-psychoanalytical model of authoritarianism, we can gain insight into the Trump paradox, and these other atrocities, by glimpsing into the unconscious and irrational motivations of humanity. Beginning with a brief survey of the discovery of the unconscious following the faulty ideologies of the Enlightenment, this paper suggests that the description of the authoritarian personality, developed primarily by the Frankfurt School with Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm,
B.A. Degree Final Thesis: The Authoritarians. A study of politics and psychology
2019
My thesis for a B.A. degree at the University of Iceland. It is a critical analysis of the RWA (Right Wing Authoritarianism) theory by Altemeyer and more recent iterations of it. Its strengths, its weaknesses and how it has been used and applied in research. Through this analysis the aim was to get a clearer understanding of the nature of authoritarianism as a feature of personality rather than ideology and the efficacy of Altemeyer's theory as a psychological metric to measure authoritarianism as a variable.
Authoritarianism: Psychological Reflections and Theological Implications
2001
The end of World War II as well as the defeat of Nazism and Fascism in Europe spurred western psychologists to investigate the phenomenon of authoritarianism prevalent in the culture of the 1930s and 40s. It was a dark period of brutal and irrational behaviours on the part of some leaders and their followers. Questions like: why did people elect and follow enthusiastically authoritarian and non-democratic leaders, why were the Jews particularly targeted as the object of prejudice and elimination, what were the characteristics of authoritarian personalities, what was the role of obedience in such a society is propelled
Johannes Kieding Eng. 101 Informational Essay 2008 On "The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power" by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad
Swiss Journal of Psychology, 2008
... Author Note Stefano Passini, Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Italy. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. ... References Adorno, TW, Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, DJ, & Sanford, RN (1950). The authoritarian personality. ...
Authoritarianism Revisited: A Kuhnian Analysis of Research on Psychological Authoritarianism
This paper addresses three questions about psychological authoritarianism via a critical discussion of key texts in the literature. The first question is whether the intellectual history of this particularly extensive and intensive cross-disciplinary sub-field of social and political psychology bears any significant relationship to Thomas Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions, and if so, to what extent. The second is whether the eighty years of research into this sub-field provides a sufficient basis for drawing well corroborated inferences about its characteristics, and if so, what substantive conclusions can be drawn from them. The final question addresses the possible significant lines of psychology and political science research that the findings of this sub-field suggest. This paper addresses these questions by discussing Kuhn’s conception of scientific revolutions, examining the intellectual history of psychological authoritarianism, and exploring the extent to which the latter conforms to the pattern presented by Kuhn. It concludes by raising a number of questions arising from the recent literature.