Talk:The Authoritarian Personality

Proposed merge
Does this need to be a separate article from the article on the concept of Authoritarian personality? What, if anything, can be said about the book itself that shouldn't be merged into the page on the concept? VoluntarySlave 21:57, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
 * The fact that the book is discredited does not mean the end of political psychology. The original concept of the authoritarian personality is a dud though. Intangible 03:19, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
 * Refer to my entry on Talk:Authoritarian_personality, the theory doesn't necessarily seem discredited, even if the methods in some cases were suspect (it's my understanding that the major criticisms of the methods were smaller criticisms). --MyOwnLittlWorld 00:17, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
 * There are several problems with the "The Authoritarian personality". Firstly the F-scale as developed by Adorno et al is not corrected for aquiescent response styles. Anyone who answers yes to all the questions is a fascist. Secondly the underlying freudian/marxist analysis is rejected by many critics as unscientific. Thirdly, the personality trait that seems to be quantified by the F-scale is an "old fashioned" personality. If you do the test trying to answer like Herbert Hoover, you are a fascist. --- Tonganoxie Jim —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.60.163.16 (talk) 05:46, 13 February 2007 (UTC).
 * As with the other article, Erich Fromm's studies are missing. Fromm's studies were captured by Adorno and used by him for his theories, allowing him to pretend those were his own scientific work... So the article is incomplete and missleading....

But there is an additonal and very important problem: Both articels mix murderous fascist attitudes, as massively existing in the 20s, 30s and 40s in Italy and Germany, with extreme colonial rascism such as used by the elites in GB/UK, France, Belgium and - very important but usually not mentioned - the colonial power Russia, to terrorize und subdue surrounding nations. 139.139.67.69 (talk) 11:31, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Quotes from crticism citations
From Wolfe: "DESPITE ITS BULK, prestigious authors, and seeming relevance, however, The Authoritarian Personality never did achieve its status as a classic. Four years after its publication, it was subject to strong criticism in Studies in the Scope and Method of "The Authoritarian Personality" (Free Press, 1954), edited by the psychologists Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda. Two criticisms were especially devastating, one political, the other methodological."

From Mangus:

"From the unrestrained criticisms embodied in this volume, the concepts and methods of the parent volume take a full beating."

- --some jerk on the Internet    (talk)  18:48, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Zizek
In the Zizek passage he is neither expressing his own views nor, pace Overagainst, is he "ridiculing the view attributed to him" (he does that later in the article in reply to another author). He is summarising the opinions of Kevin B. MacDonald in his book The Culture of Critique. By all means attribute these views to MacDonald, but not to Zizek, though frankly they seem to me to be little more than a banal variation of a Protocols-type jewish-conspiracy augument. Paul B (talk) 11:01, 19 January 2015 (UTC)

Methodology
I am thinking of expanding on the details of the methodology and some findings. I have in mind a source I am familiar with: the chapter Brown, R., (2004) The Authoritarian Personality and the Organization of Attitudes in Jost and Sidanius (Eds), Key Readings in Social Psychology: Political Psychology, Psychology Press. He goes into a very comprehensive summary of the book, as well as criticism and early reviews.

What do you think? Ngyi1983 (talk) 18:19, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Positivism
I think the reference to Adorno ascribing to anti-positivism sheds an unfavorable light to the work. The work is itself heavily empirical. Moreover, antipositivism is a broader notion than not caring to substantiate ones believes on facts, as the existing formulation implies. Eventually I think the mention, as is, is indeed opinionated. Ngyi1983 (talk) 18:19, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

"Marxist books"
I am removing this book from the category of "Marxist" books, for several reasons.

(1) this book is not considered as part of a canon of Marxist literature upheld by any Communist Party anywhere in time.

(2) the book was sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, not the Communist Party USA. The book is, essentially, a product of the organised American Jewish community, not the Marxist movement.

(3) the status of Adorno as a "Marxist thinker" within Marxist circles is highly controversial because of his revisionism. Did he use some intellectual tools derived (or misappropriated) from Marx? Yes. But he also borrowed from Freud and various other dodgy bourgeois writers, but we don't put this in a "Freudian books" category. There were four authors of this book, the other three are Jewish psychologists with no connection to Marxism at all. Claíomh Solais (talk) 02:04, 4 January 2018 (UTC)


 * The correct term would probably be Freudo-Marxist books. They're no less Marxist and so is Adorno, even if some entirely undialetical Marxist-Leninist (aka Stalinist) blockheads entirely stuck in pre-Marxist and un-Marxist, undialectical Feuerbachian materialism (aka, "Communist Parties", where Claíomh Solais probably even means only those affiliated with the USSR) may disagree, but that's only because they have done away with Hegel (specifically, first nature vs. second nature) and don't understand Marx on dialectical materialism. Prior to 1917, even Lenin was a rightfully marginalized thinker in Marxist thought, representing a minority view originated by Kautsky and borrowing from non-Marxist Ferdinand Lasalle (keywords here would be teleologism, Lassalleanism, and Lenin's failure to understand Marx other than as a philosopher of a more efficient Capitalism which Lenin mistook for socialism already, see Marxist critiques of Lenin and Soviet Communism by Luxemburg and Herbert Marcuse), and there's entire libraries dedicated to how Stalin paid lip-service to Marx at best after having officially abolished Hegel immediately following his rise to power, while it is the fans of Lenin and Stalin who adamantly question Adorno's Marxism.


 * Adorno never "borrowed from dodgy bourgeois writers" without severely critiquing and thoroughly re-interpreting them from a Marxist and materialist perspective, cf. The Revised Psychoanalysis, Sociology and Psychology, and Introduction to Sociology. Besides that, Adorno also goes to great lengths to defend Marx's model of economic basis and after-the-fact ideological superstructure against unfounded attacks in Negative Dialectics. To put it short, according to Adorno, Freud's tripartite psychological apparatus is the product of social and economical relations and conditions throughout history. So, Adorno did nothing Marx hadn't done in regards to bourgeois writers, even if Adorno edged out some ideological issues that Marx didn't get to during his lifetime, further clarifying the specific relation between basis and superstructure, the way of how and why basis turns into and is being distorted into ideological superstructure.


 * In fact, while Stalinist blockheads claim Freudo-Marxists wouldn't be Marxists, Adornites say one can't use dialectical materialism as a method of analysis and critique of contemporary conditions anymore without a Freud read materialistically, which is a lesson learned especially from the failure of the German Revolution of 1918 that led to Auschwitz, all due to the societal tendency for conformist revolt rather than genuine socialist revolution. Although there are seeds to this insight already found in Marx's analyses of Lassalleanism, Bonapartism, anti-Semitism (cf. The Jewish Question), and overall Marx's materialist critique of ideology (Charaktermaske, fetishism, The German Ideology) that would've made Marx immediately incorporate Freud as a valid source within his theory, even if one to be critiqued and interpreted, not unlike how he had "turned Hegel on his feet". Within this context, György Lukács's 1923 History and Class Consciousness is an important link between classical Marx and materialist schools of Freudo-Marxism as a lesson of the historical tendency for conformist revolts. --2003:EF:170B:F993:9D7C:9EB6:D77E:A978 (talk) 16:18, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Brown's criticism & "Left-wing authoritarianism"
Brown's criticism as cited in the article boils down to that they didn't read the entire study and/or have little knowledge of Adorno's overall theory behind the study. Adorno dedicates an entire chapter in the study to repression being the actual result of socio-economic factors, and this is far from Adorno's only work where he keeps pounding home that most basic fact about Critical Theory being a materialist theory (the fact that lately, some postmodernist literary and art critics largely based upon Heideggerian (post-)structuralism and Foucault entirely ignorant of economy and materialist concepts of society have claimed that label of CT, or are lumped in with it as part of some supposed "Continental philosophy" by some Anglo-American scholars, is a different matter altogether).

Main sources for that fact besides the study itself include, but are not limited to, Adorno's essays and lectures, The Revised Psychoanalysis, Sociology and Psychology, and Introduction to Sociology. Besides that, Adorno also goes to great lengths to defend Marx's model of economic basis and after-the-fact ideological superstructure in Negative Dialectics, while heavily critiquing on logical and methodological grounds the related positivist and pro-Capitalist (and today, neoliberal) tendency to deny the existence of such a thing as (materialist) society altogether, a denial commonly used to "disprove" Marx.

Finally, why is Brown's unfettered assessment that the F-scale is a correct indicator of Fascism ("the Berkeley researchers seem to have been correct in their belief that the F-Scale is a measure of fascism.") listed under "criticism"?

As for the sub-section entitled, Left-wing authoritarianism, the groups researched by those studies as supposed proof of such a thing as authoritarianism on the left and such suppoedly being a valid criticism of The Authoritarian Personality wouldn't be considered Left-wing by Adorno at all, but rather a conformistically revolting false Left (people on the right who confuse themselves as Left by subscribing to structurally anti-Semitic conspiracy theories commonly mistaken as "Left-wing") or Querfront, cf. his essays Meinung - Wahn - Gesellschaft ("Opinion - Delusion - Society"), The Meaning of Working Through the Past, Notes on Social Conflict Today, or some of his published private correspondence on the decaying, increasingly anti-intellectually activist students movement, as well as many German essays and articles by recent Adornite anti-Germans and Ideologiekritiker (whether they're Left-wing materialist or Right-wing, postmodernist language-fetishistic Ideologiekritiker), publishing since the 1990s in political magazines such as Konkret, Jungle World, Analyse & Kritik, Sans Phrase, and Bahamas, citing Adorno on this phenomenon of a false Left, Querfront, and this kind of "hidden" or "disguised" structral aka secondary anti-Semitism. --2003:EF:170B:F993:9D7C:9EB6:D77E:A978 (talk) 18:33, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Gaensslen criticism
The 1973 criticism by Gaensslen is bollocks as such that TAS actually argues that Capitalism *NEEDS* people to be rigid and socially adaptive/integrated in order to make them more productive in the sense of what Capitalism sees as productive (also see instrumental reason). According to TAS, authoritarian people are not maladaptive when it comes to basically authoritarian Capitalist society, they're maladaptive to liberal views, minorities, and other cultures, as a way to channel their frustration under Capitalism and project their own socially shunned impulses upon that which they're maladaptive to, using those as scapegoats for what Capitalism is doing to them. It's the main reason why in many of his writings, Adorno endlessly critiques social integration and social adaptation under Capitalism, because it makes people scapegoat minorities and liberal democracy for that which is actually Capitalism's doing. --2003:EF:1709:2902:50F9:B7A9:2355:8236 (talk) 13:06, 28 August 2021 (UTC)