What is the F Scale Reading Group?

some more links to look at before Saturday's meeting

To the new subscribers, please join the F Scale Reading Group. It’s for paid subscribers only (as much to keep out trolls as for $$$. It is however, work for me, work I enjoy). Zoom invite below paywall.

As a joke I wanted to call the group “How Fascist Are You?” as a way to use the advertising/marketing/personalization language that offers us subjective appeals and weakens our ability to deal with objective shared realities.

We started meeting a month ago to read Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality again, partially to explore the question of contemporary forms of authoritarianism that the midcentury sociological theories may not be able to account for — such as PMC liberal authoritarianism and the rise of new forms of anti-semitism.

The sociologists Adorno worked with developed a questionnaire to measure people’s proclivities to Fascism. After taking the questionnaire, people were interviewed at length and given a score. A high score meant more Fascist proclivities, a low score, meant less susceptibility to Fascism. Their research was funded by private donors who thought the question of complicity with Fascism and authoritarianism had to be understood to prevent the rise of far right military regimes, of Nazism.

Sociological method has evolved since the publication of TA, but it is an important piece of twentieth century political and intellectual history that is well worth exploring.

That accusation is being thrown around recklessly and I wanted to figure out what Freud and Adorno and Horkheimer understood of the antisemitism in 1930s Europe of which they were victims.

We can’t just jump right into the text: we started with a discussion last time of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.

This week we are discussing Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment on Saturday morning, 8 am, PST. We go for about 90 minutes. I lecture for about fifteen minutes at a time and then we have questions for about ten minutes and then we go on and at the end we do a round of questions.

Below the paywall, you will find more links to look at before Saturday’s meeting. Meetings are not recorded for privacy issues and also to encourage freer discussions.

People on the Left have criticized Dialectic of Enlightenment for not having an account of class. When Right wing pundits go on about “Cultural Marxism,” they are referring to some garbled idea about the Frankfurt School, who are incidentally loathed by post-structuralists, etc. Crazy right?