Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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49 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very important book, October 22, 2003
Dont be thrown of by some of the other reviews. If you start of by stating that Adorno is a Marxist and therefore must have had an agenda, your doing exactly what you have accused Adorno of. Furthermore this book wasnt single-handedly written by Adorno, far from it, and whether or not Adorno realy was a Marxist is irellevant since Adornos latter ideas have little or nothing to do with this book. The Authoritarian Personality remains a very interesting study in human behaviour and nature. It has clearly been written as a reaction to the horrors of what was happening then in Nazi Germany and the authors tried to come up with a full explanation. Although I dont doubt the integrity of authors motives, they did obviously not succeed in there goal to come up with an extensive theory for the existence of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, because the focussed almost entirely on the personality of the individual and disregarded the unique social en economical circumstances in Germany after WWI, that have undoubtedly played an important role as well. The fact that, in hindsight, it has become apparent that the authors have not succeeded to live up to the overambitious conclusions does, however, certainly not make The Authoritarian Personality any less interesting. A lot can still be learned about the causes of ethnocentrism from this book. It is unique in its scale and historical value and should not be disregarded by anyone who wants to learn more about ethnocentrism as long as you keep the books apparent short comings in mind. You should, however, also keep in mind that the criticism this book has received is certainly not allways justified at all, but caused by the fact that a lot of it's conclusions still remain valid, but these are not always pleasant for everyone.
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2 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A classic in ad-hoc theorizing, April 1, 2008
Back when I was in grad school Adorno's work was taken as a given, without question, and that uncritical regard still holds today. Contemporary political theorists on the left like the idea that conservative or libertarian beliefs are an indication of a psychopathology of some sort. One only has to thumb through DSM-IV to see how many political judgments there are masquerading as science. (Consider "oppositional defiant disorder'- similar to the diagnosis used to institutionalize dissidents in the Soviet Union.)
Many psychologists of the post-war accepted Adorno's work in large part because it told them what they wanted to hear- it equated authoritarianism, which they saw as the root of tyranny, with what were to them conservative political views. Buried in all the questions and descriptive and inferential statistics are a set of ad-hoc assumption that are never really tested.
But a critical reviewer might, on reading, wonder why such attributes as independent mindedness or a preference for the objective over the subjective would be associated with an "authoritarian personality". The answer, of course, is that while Adorno may not have set out to create a political doctrine, his own politics so colored his work that it could not help but reflect the Marxist notion of man and society. Adorno's ideal citizen, like Marx's, is first and foremost concerned with membership and belonging, and adherence to the mores of the group. These people do not become leaders of Fascist movements. Instead, they become the followers, the True Believers without whom the Stalins and the Hitlers cannot thrive. The independent thinkers- the ones who refuse to accept the premise that the group is more important than the individual- are the ones who end up resisting these authoritarian movements.
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16 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Authoritarian Personality - A Dangerous Study., October 2, 2004
_The Authoritarian Personality_ involved a series of studies sponsored by the American Jewish Committee which were supposed to define a certain personality type which would be easily taken up with antidemocratic propaganda, in light of the tragedy and disaster that was the Third Reich. Scales were developed to assess Antisemitism, Political-Economic Conservativism (which amounted to support for laissez-faire capitalism), and Authoritarianism (the F (for Fascist) scale). Both the Antisemitism scale and the Political-Economic Conservativism scale involved predictable statements in which the subjects had to state their level of agreement with in order to achieve a score. The F scale, involved a series of statements which were designed to measure conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception (i.e. "Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, and the tender-minded."), superstition and stereotypy, power and "toughness", destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity (i.e. "The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world"), and concern about "sexual goings-on". While some of these statements were predictable, others were rather strange (and could not be easily answered in terms of Agree/Disagree because they were too broad and categorical). (My own score on this scale was rather high, about 4 out of a possible 6.) Various populations including college students and criminals were examined in terms of these scales and various theories were proposed to explain different personality sub-types. The ironic thing about this research is that it does not really show much of anything. While the authoritarian type may be interesting from a theoretical perspective, it is doubtful that such a type actually amounts to the kind of person who would unleash a fascist tyranny. In my view, the authoritarian type would be a rather eccentric individual, but probably not one who would engage in mass murder. This study must be seen in light of the fact that among the main authors were Marxists (prime among them Theodore Adorno) who wanted to advance an anticonservative agenda, downplaying conventional morality among other things. Also, the authors seem to think that those prone to give a "mystical" explanation for world events are also those prone to be sympathetic to a fascist state. I find this ironic because in my view the fascist state was a completely technicized one, created along "rationalist"/scientistic lines. I believe this reveals the bias of the Marxist materialist against philosophical worldviews which incorporate transcendental non-material elements. Also, in terms of stereotypy it is assumed that the stereotypes in question are always false. While stereotypes may reveal a dysfunction in rational thought, there is no reason to assume that a stereotype need be always false. Actual empirical study is necessary to confirm or disconfirm the truth of a given stereotype, provided of course that that stereotype is even phrased in a manner which leads itself to verification/falsification. Finally, it is assumed that conventional morality is something that involves submission to an unjust authority, rather than being a natural outgrowth of biological and natural constraints upon the human animal. Since these sorts of questions were not addressed in the study, I believe that while it may be interesting from some theoretical perspective, its practical utility is limited. In terms of actual practice, the results of this study could be disastrous, in fact resulting in a sort of "reverse tyranny" in which individuals categorized as "authoritarian" by such measures are denied civil liberties. A good book which deals with this question is by Paul Gottfried entitled _After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State_. In addition, much of the theorizing in this book is based on Freudian theories of the unconscious. These types of Freudian theories are highly problematic in themselves, and their scientific standing is highly dubious to say the least. Many of the individuals interviewed in this book could clearly be described as unbalanced and possibly insane; however, there is little reason to think that these are the individuals who would be at the forefront of a future fascism.
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