Authoritarianism: Psychological Reflections and Theological Implications (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.
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...
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.
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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.
Moral Cowardness Obedience and the Rise of Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism is religion, and science let alone politics, is becoming increasingly acceptable, not particularly because so many people explicitly believe in it but because they feel themselves individually powerless and anxious so what else can one do… or follow the mass political hoard… to follow the authority of customs, public opinion, and social
Fruits of Fear, Seeds of Terror: The Political Implications of Psychological Authoritarianism
Fruits of Fear, Seeds of Terror: The Political Implications of Psychological Authoritarianism, 2005
This dissertation answers the question: “What is psychological authoritarianism?” It examines over eighty years of research on psychological authoritarianism, with special emphasis on Adomo et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality and Robert Altemeyer’s work on “right-wing authoritarianism”. It explains why Adomo et al. developed the theoretical framework underlying the F Scale, and how it undergirds Altemeyer’s much more recent and methodologically sophisticated work on the RWA Scale. Both Adomo et al. and Altemeyer understand psychological authoritarianism as the commonalty of three dimensions: authoritarian aggression, conventionality, and authoritarian submission. The dissertation argues that their data indicate that “authoritarian aggression” constitutes the central dimension of “general” psychological authoritarianism, independent of specific ideological leanings. It concludes that psychological authoritarian is authoritarian aggression, nothing more, nothing less. The dissertation rebuts the claim that psychological authoritarianism and conservatism are the same phenomenon. Wilson et al.’s C Scale is the most influential measure of conservatism. Their formulation of “psychological conservatism” parallels key features of Adomo et al.’s theory. Measures of “authoritarianism” relate well to “conservatism” because they are conceptualized and operationalized in similar ways. However, sixty years of empirical findings strongly suggest that these are related but different phenomena. Jost et al.’s efforts to “explain” “revolutionary conservatism” highlight the intellectual contradictions that arise when the two are conflated. The work identifies their common characteristics, and also why they are different. It also provides detailed arguments for why they should be conceptualized as related but distinct attitudes. This dissertation is an exercise in “conceptual clarification” via “psychometrical hermeneutics”. This entails evaluating the degree to which attitudinal phenomena measured by scales correspond to the concepts being operationalized via the careful examination of scale attributes and item wordings. “Psychometrical hermeneutics” also constructs reconceptualizations where the measured phenomenon and concept diverge. This work argues that, in many instances, discrepancies between the conceptualizations underlying scales and the psychometric implications of their operationalizations resulted in conceptual confusion that prevented scholars from properly understanding psychological authoritarianism for much of the past half century.
Authoritarianism and Fear of Deviance
2009
Two studies (N = 217) examined the relation between right-wing authoritarianism and a battery of self-report measures of various fears. The results suggest that high authoritarians are no more fearful of most types of threats (e.g. animals, failure, interpersonal situations) than low authoritarians. High authoritarians are, however, more afraid of situations involving social deviance. The publication of The Authoritarian Personality, by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950), was a landmark event in personality and social psychology. The book was arguably the first, and certainly the most influential, systematic investigation of how personality shapes attitudes and belief systems. It proposed that prejudice, ethnocentrism, and the predisposition to accept right-wing ideology and fascist governments, were deeply rooted in the psychology of the individual. After a long decline during the later decades of the 20th Century, the study of authoritarianism has been greeted with renewed interest in the past few years. Indeed, a great number of contemporary social and political issues, such as increased opposition to immigration, debates over how to handle suspected terrorists, and proposed constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage all point to the continued relevance of the authoritarian personality today. According to Altemeyer (1996), authoritarianism can be defined as the co-variation of three specific psychological tendencies. These include submission to authority, aggression toward individuals targeted by authority, and adherence to social conventions established by authorities. Stated another way, authoritarians are submissive toward authority figures and the norms of ingroups, and aggressive toward deviants and the members of outgroups. Decades of research support this interpretation of the construct (but see Kreindler, 2005) and indicate strong to moderate correlations with racial prejudice, anti-homosexual attitudes, punitive jury decisions, and many related attitudes and behaviors (Altemeyer, 1996; Stone, Lederer, & Christie, 1993). The authoritarian potential for prejudice, hostility, and aggression is well documented, yet there has been considerably less empirical research on their other emotional tendencies. One conspicuous gap in our knowledge
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.