The Authoritarian Character Revisited: Genesis and Key Concepts (original) (raw)
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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.
Theoretical and methodological foundations of the authoritarian personality
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1993
This article provides a history of the theoretical and methodological contributions, particularly Erich Fromm's, of the sub-syndromes of the concept of authoritarianism and the relationship of his work to the classical study by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford.
The Authoritarian Institution. Else Frenkel and the University of Vienna
Serendipities. Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences
Else Frenkel was associated with the University of Vienna for more than five years in total. She was studying eight semesters, from 1926 to 1930 at Austria’s biggest university, reached the position of a research assistant in the study year 1931/32 and worked a second time as temporary employee in 1936. The political climate in these years was characterized by racist Antisemitism and attacks against the parliamentarian democracy, by violence against “Jewish” and left-wing students and discrimination against scientists who did not fit into the “Aryan” and German national template. Fascism and National Socialism had a huge backing especially in the student body, many years before Austria became a part of Nazi Germany. This article wants to draw an atmospheric picture of the University of Vienna in these years, especially from 1926 to 1932, when Frenkel was almost continuously connected with the institution.
The Frankfurt School on Antisemitism, Authoritarianism, and Right-wing Radicalism
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2020
This is an extended review essay on "The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism" by Lars Rensmann (2017), the new Verso edition of "The Authoritarian Personality" by Theodor W. Adorno et al. (2019), and "Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus" by Theodor W. Adorno (2019). It principally reconstructs psychoanalytic conceptions of the authoritarian or potentially fascist subject that ground the Frankfurt School's empirical and theoretical studies from the 1930s to the 1950s. It assesses Rensmann's overall theory of antisemitism and criticizes it for being overly concerned with the specificity of antisemitism and Jews, which unfortunately closes off close psychological, sociological, and historical links between antisemitism and other forms of racism and othering that the Frankfurt School illuminated in their studies conducted in exile in America. It also goes further than Rensmann's book in contrasting Horkheimer and Adorno's influential theory of antisemitism as "false projection" with alternate theories of their time offered by Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt. The essay concludes that other cultural approaches to antisemitism like that of David Nirenberg, who is more sympathetic to Horkheimer and Adorno than Rensmann, are ultimately more compelling.
The “Authoritarian Personality” Reconsidered: the Phantom of “Left Fascism”*
The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2019
This article explores the question of ''Left fascism,'' which emerged in relation to discussions around the Student Movement in the German Federal Republic in the crucial decade between 1967-1977. The term was originally coined by Jü rgen Habermas in a lecture entitled ''The Phantom Revolution and its Children'' in which he suggests that the extreme voluntarism of the students could not but be characterized as ''Left fascist.'' Such a characterization becomes the basis for a vitally important exchange of letters between Herbert Marcuse and Theodor W. Adorno from January to August of 1969 on the relation between theory and praxis. After first sketching Adorno's conception of the ''authoritarian personality,'' with the help of Sándor Ferenczi's concept of the ''identification with the aggressor,'' the article proceeds to examine the exchange of the letters between Adorno and Marcuse, illustrating Adorno's changed orientation: that ''fascism'' or ''authoritarianism'' maybe either left or right. Finally, some conclusions are drawn about the authoritarian tendencies of the contemporary Left.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2021
The rise of the notions of authoritarianism and the authoritarian personality is directly linked to pathologies of early modernity and to social constellations that systematically produce dispositions of character that ultimately form the base of Nazi fascism. The aim of this article, thus, is to explore sociological actuality, i.e., the explanatory power and informative value of the concepts of authoritarianism and the authoritarian personality. Therefore, throughout the article, authoritarianism is framed as a social, i.e., relational approach, similar to that of recognition. However, as authoritarianism does not point towards autonomy, it can be read as a pathology of recognition. The text starts by presenting authoritarianism and authoritarian personality as introduced to the academic debate by early Critical Theory, including a description of the historical and intellectual conditions of the time. It then explores three essential elements of these concepts and how they have cha...