The Authoritarian Personality: Preface

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Today's excerpt begins on page ix.

This is a book about social discrimination.
But its purpose is not simply to add a few more empirical findings to an already extensive body of information.
The central theme of the work is a relatively new concept— the rise of an “anthropological” species we call the authoritarian type of man.
In contrast to the bigot of the older style he seems to combine the ideas and skills which are typical of a highly industrialized society with irrational or anti-rational beliefs.
He is at the same time enlightened and superstitious, proud to be an individualist and in constant fear of not being like all the others, jealous of his independence and inclined to submit blindly to power and authority.
The character structure which comprises these conflicting trends has already attracted the attention of modern philosophers and political thinkers.
This book approaches the problem with the means of sociopsychological research.

The implications and values of the study are practical as well as theoretical.
The authors do not believe that there is a short cut to education which will eliminate the long and often circuitous road of painstaking research and theoretical analysis.
Nor do they think that such a problem as the position of minorities in modern society, and more specifically the problem of religious and racial hatreds, can be tackled successfully either by the propaganda of tolerance or by apologetic refutation of errors and lies.
On the other hand, theoretical activity and practical application are not separated by an unbridgeable gulf.
Quite the contrary: the authors are imbued with the conviction that the sincere and systematic scientific elucidation of a phenomenon of such great historical meaning can contribute directly to cultural atmosphere in which hatred breeds.

This conviction must not be brushed aside as an optimistic illusion.
In the history of civilization there have been not a few instances when mass delusions were healed not by focused propaganda but, in the final analysis, because scholars, with their unobtrusive yet insistent work habits, studied what was at the root of the delusion.
Their intellectual contribution, operating within the framework of the development of society as a whole, was decisively effective.

I should like to cite two examples.
The superstitious belief in witchcraft overcome in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries after men had come more and more under the influence of the results of modern science, the impact of Cartesian rationalism was decisive.
This school of philosophers demonstrated—and the natural scientists following them made practical use of their great insight—that the previously accepted belief in the immediate effect of spiritual factors on the realm of the corporal is an illusion.
Once this scientifically untenable dogma was eliminated, the foundations of the belief in magic were destroyed.

As a more recent example, we have only to think of the impact of Sigmund Freud’s work on modem culture.
Its primary importance does not lie in the fact that psychological research and knowledge have been enriched by new findings but in the fact that for some fifty years the intellectual world, and especially the educational, has been made more and more aware of the connection between the suppression of children (both within the home and outside) and society’s usually naive ignorance of the psychological dynamics of the life of the child and the adult alike.
The permeation of the social consciousness at large with the scientifically acquired experience that the events of early childhood are of prime importance for the happiness and work potential of the adult has brought about a revolution in the relation between parents and children which would have been deemed impossible a hundred years ago.

The present work, we hope, will find a place in this history of the interdependence between science and the cultural climate.
Its ultimate goal is to open new avenues in a research area which can become of immediate practical significance.
It seeks to develop and promote an understanding of social-psychological factors which have made it possible for the authoritarian type of man to threaten to replace the individualistic and democratic type prevalent in the past century and a half of our civilization, and of the factors by which this threat may be contained.
Progressive analysis of this new “anthropological” type and of its growth conditions, with an ever increasing scientific differentiation, will enhance the chances of a genuinely educational counterattack.

Confidence in the possibility of a more systematic study of the mechanisms of discrimination and especially of a characterological discriminationtype is not based on the historical experience of the last fifteen years alone, but also on developments within the social sciences themselves during recent decades.
Considerable and successful efforts have been made in this country as well as in Europe to raise the various disciplines dealing with man as a social phenomenon to the organizational level of cooperation that has been a tradition in the natural sciences.
What I am thinking of are not merely mechanical arrangements for bringing together work done in various fields of study, as in symposia or textbooks, but the mobilization of different methods and skills, developed in distinct fields of theory and empirical investigation, for one common research program.

Such cross-fertilization of different branches of the social sciences and psychology is exactly what has taken place in the present volume.
Experts in the fields of social theory and depth psychology, content analysis, clinical psychology, political sociology, and projective testing pooled their experiences and findings.
Having worked together in the closest cooperation, they now present as the result of their joint efforts the elements of a theory of the authoritarian type of man in modern society.

They are not unmindful that they were not the first to have studied this phenomenon.
They gratefully acknowledge their debt to the remarkable psychological profiles of the prejudiced individual projected by Sigmund Freud, Maurice Samuel, Otto Fenichel, and others.
Such brilliant insights were in a sense the indispensable prerequisites for the methodological integration and research organization which the present study has attempted, and we think achieved to a certain degree, on a scale previously unapproached.

Institutionally, this book represents a joint undertaking of the Berkeley Public Opinion Study and the Institute of Social Research.
Both organizations had already made their mark in efforts to integrate various sciences and different research methods.
The Berkeley Public Opinion Study had devoted itself to the examination of prejudice in terms of social psychology and had hit upon the close correlation between overt prejudice and certain personality traits of a destructive nihilistic nature, suggested by an irrationally pessimistic ideology of the intolerant.
The Institute of Social Research was dedicated to the principle of theoretical and methodological integration from its earliest days at the University of Frankfurt, and published several studies growing out of this basic approach.
In one volume, on authority and the family, the concept of the “authoritarian personality” was put forward as a link between psychological dispositions and political leanings.
Pursuing this line of thought further, the Institute formulated and published in 1939 a comprehensive research project on anti-Semitism.
Some five years later, a series of discussions with the late Dr. Ernst Simmel and Professor R. Nevitt Sanford of the University of California laid the basis for the present project.

As finally organized, the research staff was headed by four senior members, Dr. R. N. Sanford of the Berkeley Public Opinion Study and Dr. T. W. Adorno of the Institute of Social Research, who were the directors, and Dr. Else Frenkel-Brunswik and Dr. Daniel Levinson.
Their collaboration was so close, perhaps I should say democratic, and the work so evenly divided among them that it became clear at an early stage that they ought to share equally in the responsibility and the credit for the present publication.
The main concepts of the study were evolved by the team as a whole.

This is true above all of the idea of the indirect measurement of antidemocratic trends, the F scale.
Some division of labor could not be avoided, however, and it proved advisable to have the various chapters signed by individual staff members.
The actual writing process necessarily involves a more intimate occupation with the materials under consideration and thus a measure of more specific responsibility.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that each of the four senior members contributed to every chapter and hence that the work as a whole is thoroughly collective.

It may be of interest to note the primary assignments of each of the senior staff members during the actual research process.
Dr. Sanford conceived the way the various techniques should be combined and planned the research procedures.
Much of his time was devoted to detailed case studies, with special reference to the dynamic etiology of the prejudiced personality.
Dr. Adorno introduced sociological dimensions related to personality factors and characterological concepts concomitant with authoritarianism.
He also analyzed the ideological sections of the interviews by means of categories of social theory.
Dr. Brunswik formulated some of the first personality variables of the research.
On the basis of her earlier work, she carried through the systematic, dynamically oriented categorization and quantification of the interview material.
Dr. Levinson had primary responsibility for the AS, E, and PEC scales, for the analysis of ideology in psychological terms, for the Projective Question analysis, and for the statistical design and procedure.

Three monographic chapters, one an over-all presentation of the methodology and results of one of the main techniques, the Thematic Apperception Test, and two dealing with “critical” groups were written by Betty Aron, Maria Levinson, and William Morrow.
All three were permanently on the staff of the study and completely familiar with its progress.

The project could not have been realized without the generous and intelligent support of the American Jewish Committee.
In 1944 the Committee, feeling the need for a sound research basis for the financial and organizational support it planned to give to cooperative studies, of a type which this book exemplifies, decided to create a Department of Scientific Research.
From the first the Department was conceived as a scientific center to stimulate and co-ordinate the work of leading scientists in the sociology and psychology of prejudice and, at the same time, as a laboratory for evaluating action programs.
Though the members of the Department’s research staff are constantly under pressure to solve problems set up for them by the day-to-day work of an extensive organization fighting for democratic rights on several broad fronts, they have never shirked the responsibility of furthering basic research programs.
This volume symbolizes that link between democratic education and fundamental research.