The Authoritarian Personality

Where do you score on the F scale?

At the end of World War II, social science was open to the methodologies and questions raised by Critical Theory, which the Far Right and Alt Right have decided to call “Cultural Marxism.” It was a time when the horrors of anti-Semitism seemed to provide urgent motivation for a study of its psychology. One of the results of sponsored research that addressed this issue led to the publication of The Authoritarian Personality, a data driven study based on surveys and interviews with Americans to measure their proclivity for Fascism.

A superficial overview of the study is provided here. Ars Technica also provides a take it yourself survey where you can take the the test to see how you score on the F scale. The higher your score, the more susceptible to authoritarianism you are.

Take the result with a grain of salt. You have taken a lot of surveys. You know how to game the system.

What I think is most astonishing about the questions and these interests are raised by Adorno’s work — is the attempt to measure belief in conspiracy theory and astrology together with a generalized authoritarian attitude grounded in a suspicion of reason and science.

I think the “In this house, we believe in science” signs that are displayed almost exclusively in high rent, high real estate value neighborhoods are a virtue hoarding sign of the irrationality of liberalism and its attempts to characterize its adversaries as deplorable numbskulls, so things are more complex today than in 1947 with regard to “information” and science.

To me, reason and rationality represent the highest values of Marxism and liberal irrationality is just as virulent as illiberal irrationality in its hatred of the dialectic.

Freud theorized that the hatred of the Jews as being based in the German resentment of monotheism. They were the last and most poorly converted Christians in Europe. The Jews represented reason and rationality, in the forms of monotheism’s demands on believers to renounce paganism for a more austere form of worship and in the primitive hatred of the market, whose logic was attributed to Jews. Anti-semitism is a virulent symptom of capitalist modernity, whose ugly fruit was harvested by the Nazis.

I am going to do a reading group on Substack for paying subscribers about this work, working in a series of ideas about Midcentury Modernism’s commitment to reason and its interdisciplinary socialist roots.