The five-volume series just published by Harper’s under the title “Studies in Prejudice” has won immediate recognition as a landmark, not only in the study of group prejudice, but in American social science generally. The major work, The Authoritarian Personality, and its four companion volumes, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, sum up the results of the largest research project ever undertaken into the nature of anti-Semitism, and it is certain that its findings on the personality structure of the potential followers of hate movements will influence discussion and inspire writing and research for years to come. Nathan Glazer here attempts to outline the major theory developed as the result of the studies, and to describe the chief kinds of scientific evidence gathered by the various research teams that worked on the project. Future issues will contain further articles exploring the insights and generalizations of these volumes from different points of view.

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Four years ago, this department reported on an approach to the study of prejudice which, it was predicted, held great promise for the future:¹ Else Frenkel-Brunswik and R. Nevitt Sanford of the University of California in Berkeley had made an intensive personality study of two groups of college girls, one of which had scored high, and the other low, on a test designed to detect anti-Semitism. The two groups of girls were interviewed at length, and tested by means of the Thematic Apperception Test and other so-called “projective” tests designed to obtain a deeper view of a person than may be gained from superficial contact, questionnaires, or even long interviews.

The remarkable feature of the Berkeley study was its indication that a specific type of personality went hand in hand with anti-Semitism, while another type, perhaps less specific, was likely to be free of it. Of course, like all small-scale projects in the social sciences, this study was hardly more than provocative in its results, not conclusive: only eight girls in each group—prejudiced and unprejudiced—had been subjected to intensive psychological study; it remained possible that the findings held only for middle-class college girls, and that very different results might have been obtained from more mature subjects, or from members of poorer classes—and so on.

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However, the work of Drs. Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford was not fated to remain an isolated “pilot” study holding forth a promise never to be translated into achievement, such as we may find by the score in the professional journals. Funds were made available by the American Jewish Committee to enable the unusually rich insights of this first study (which the Committee had also financed) to be followed further, wherever they might lead. The American Jewish Committee’s interest was twofold: first, the project fitted into its general policy of encouraging scholarship that increases public enlightenment on problems of Jewish concern; second, it sought to gain the benefits and guidance of modern social research for its practical program in fighting anti-Semitism.

Thus, a much larger study than the first was initiated; and from its beginning with a sampling of female students at the University of California, it expanded to a study of the minds of professional women in general, middle-class and middle-aged men in service clubs on the West Coast, persons under treatment at a psychiatric clinic, inmates of San Quentin Prison, men at a school for merchant marine officers, working-class men and women, members of parent-teachers’ associations, women’s clubs, church groups, and other middle-class groups—not to mention additional groups of students at the University of Oregon and George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Altogether, 2,099 persons were given an elaborate set of questionnaires, and of these, eighty were chosen for intensive interviewing and testing. All along, the most painstaking techniques were employed to ensure objectivity: at each stage, two or more of the project workers were engaged in coding and classifying data independently of each other so as to eliminate errors caused by the bias or personal shortcomings of the individual researchers.

All this is described in great detail, analyzed, and summed up in a huge volume, The Authoritarian Personality, written by T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, in collaboration with Betty Aron, Maria Hertz Levinson, and William Morrow (Harper, 990 pp., $7.50). Large as it is, however, this volume deals with only a part—though by far the largest—of the whole elaborate research enterprise devoted to the study of the anti-Semitic personality. Concurrently, groups of researchers in New York and Chicago had undertaken studies completely independent of the main work in California; and these additional studies are reported in two other books: Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation, by Nathan Ackerman and Marie Jahoda (Harper, 135 pp., $2.50; and Dynamics of Prejudice: A Psychological and Sociological Study of Veterans, by Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz (Harper, 227 pp., $3.50). Both these volumes, based upon different research techniques, offer independent conclusions in no way tailored to coincide with the main study.

It should also be mentioned here that two further volumes, reporting on a fourth and fifth project, have also been published by Harper: Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany, by Paul W. Massing (341 pp., $4.00), and Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator, by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman (164 pp., $2.50).² The first is a historical study, the second a close analysis of the speeches of a large sampling of anti-Semitic demagogues. Since our central interest here is the personality of the anti-Semite, neither of these books is, strictly speaking, within our area of concern, though the latter of the two certainly offers many insights, and very important ones, into the structure of at least one type of anti-Semitic personality, and at the same time complements and confirms the picture of the anti-Semitic personality given in the main study by showing how the appeals of the anti-Semitic demagogue are clearly directed at just that type of personality which is portrayed at full length in The Authoritarian Personality.

The entire research undertaking was planned by Max Horkheimer and the Institute of Social Research, and the volumes reporting its results were edited by Professor Horkheimer and Dr. Samuel H. Flowerman, head of the Department of Scientific Research of the American Jewish Committee.

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What is unique about The Authoritarian Personality—and I think it is unique in American social science—is not the vast range. and complexity of the empirical data, or the care with which they are analyzed; as far as these aspects are concerned, there are a few similar studies in American social science. Nor yet does its uniqueness lie in its wonderful interplay between theory and research, for which leading American social scientists have been pleading for years; here, too, we may find a few similar examples. What is unique is rather the type of theory that animates The Authoritarian Personality. It is not the simple, rather dimensionless idea pursued stubbornly through a vast amount of research, of which W. L. Warner’s studies of class and Lewis M. Terman’s of gifted children form such good examples: in such work the leading idea hardly grows. Nor is this book, on the other hand, filled with the kind of abstract, non-historical formulations that serve for theory in such works as The American Soldier or Management and the Worker—where the idea grows, but too often in the direction of mere terminological elaboration rather than toward new insights. For all its typically American empirical investiture, the idea in The Authoritarian Personality is an idea in the European and philosophic sense, at once specific and concrete, and yet broad enough to link the largest developments of society with the most subtle characteristics of personality. It is an idea of the kind one finds in Marx, or Freud, or Dewey, an idea which may be stated in a paragraph but can be expanded into a lifetime’s fruitful study. It is the idea of authoritarianism as a fundamental form of our society and one characteristic of social organization, the family, and individual personality.

This idea is the product of a group of social scientists who, under the leadership of Max Horkheimer, formed the Institute of Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) in Frankfort in Weimar Germany; after Hitler came to power, they migrated first to Paris, and then to New York. In the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (“Journal of Social Research”), which the Institute published from 1932 to 1941, as well as in a number of special publications—of which the most important was a huge tome, Autorität und Familie (Paris, 1936)—the Institute combined a certain tradition of European philosophical and sociological thinking with an interest in empirical social procedures to produce a body of work which this writer believes to be as yet unparalleled in the social sciences for richness of detail and depth of insight.

It is hard to characterize its position in a few phrases, but it is perhaps not unfair to say that the Institute tried to join the sociological heritage of Marx to Freud’s psychological method within the context of that philosophical tradition which has emphasized the growing power of reason to deal with man’s aggressive instincts and social problems. The studies that appeared in the Zeitschrift emphasized, among other things, the critical examination of social thinking and culture: many of the essays published contribute to the “sociology of knowledge”—that discipline which holds the social and personal needs of men to be the origin of their thinking. Often, it seems to me, these essays contributed to even more than that: the introduction of the psychoanalytic point of view served to deepen the writers’ understanding and protect them from mechanistic excesses. Erich Fromm contributed critiques of anthropological and psychoanalytic thinking, Ernest Schachtel a critique of “personality testing,” Leo Lowenthal and T. W. Adorno critiques of the role of certain literary and musical tendencies in society—and these essays are today still capable of having a strong and positive influence on American social science.

However, the Institute had no great immediate influence in America. A few books were published by its members, and these were read with interest by only a limited circle of readers. It is true that persons who had been connected with the Institute did play important roles in certain areas of American social science—Erich Fromm in psychoanalysis, Ernest Schachtel in the field of Rorschach testing, Karl Wittfogel in Oriental studies—but these men did not work in America as members of the Institute. Perhaps the breakup of the optimistic hopes of the European Left and labor movements made it impossible to preserve the common point of view on which the Institute rested—which was socialist, in the most fundamental sense.

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It is the Institute for Social Research that is chiefly responsible for the series now before us: the authors of three of the volumes—Paul W. Massing, Leo Lowenthal, and T. W. Adorno—are members of the Institute today, and one of the authors of a fourth, Marie Jahoda, has been identified with it in the past. And it is the Institute which, in its huge joint volume on Authority and the family in 1936, first raised on a major scale the question of the social role of authoritarianism—the authoritarian personality, the authoritarian family, and the authoritarian society. Let us go back to that earlier volume and quote, from the English abstract, the original formulation of the crucial role authority plays in modern society:

As we analyzed the meaning for society of the political, ethical and religious conceptions of modern times, authority appeared more and more clearly to be a decisive factor. The strengthening of the belief that there must always be a superior and an inferior and that obedience is a necessity, constitutes one of the most important cultural factors in the dynamic forces that shape society. . . . Of all the social institutions which make the individual receptive to the influence of authority, however, the family must be recognized as the most important. In its circle the individual experiences the impact of social forces. . . . The family largely determines the role these forces play in the formation of his spiritual life. Moreover, the patriarchal structure of the modern family serves by its very nature as an important preparation for the acceptance of authority in society. The great accomplishments of the modern epoch are products of a specific form of social cooperation, toward the maintenance of which the family has made an important contribution with its training for the acceptance of authority.

The German middle class would appear to represent this syndrome of authority—in personality, in family, and in society—par excellence: in its strict familial set-up, with the dominant father and the submissive mother and children; in its attachment to the hierarchies of bureaucracy and military organization; finally, in its creation and acceptance of the authoritarian state in its purest form. And it was this group that was also responsible for the most murderous form of anti-Semitism ever known. Might it not therefore be possible that anti-Semitism was a direct expression of the authoritarian personality? And not only in Germany, but wherever the authoritarian personality is to be found? Something like this chain of reasoning must have gone into the impulse which produced The Authoritarian Personality.

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In the study itself, the theory is developed much more empirically, and thus more in accord with American canons of scientific and systematic procedure. General ideas are left well in the background, and empirical procedures occupy the foreground, at least in the initial stages. The volume begins with the measurement of anti-Semitism by means of a questionnaire (called the “A-S scale”) that asks the subject whether he approves or disapproves of a large number of statements about Jews. The presumed amount of anti-Semitism in an individual or group can then be conveniently indicated by a number or score. It is then demonstrated that anti-Semitism is closely connected with the mote general pattern of ethnocentrism (the dislike of all minorities and out-groups—Negroes, Japanese, aliens, and nationals of other countries), which is measured by a second questionnaire, the “E scale.” The link between anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism is shown by correlating scores on the one scale with scores on the other—and the correlations are very high indeed.

By a similar correlation of scores on different scales, it is shown that anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism are related to a more general attitude, that of “politico-economic conservatism” (measured by the “PEC scale”). Finally, a fourth scale—the “F scale”—by asking the subject whether he agrees or disagrees with a large variety of apparently diverse attitudes, measures the extent of presumed “pre-fascist” and anti-democratic attitudes—in effect, the degree to which one may be said to manifest the “authoritarian personality.” If anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism, and politico-economic conservatism are closely related to the presence of the presumed pre-fascist traits, while the absence of anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism and the presence of liberal attitudes in political and social matters are related to low scores on the scale of pre-fascist traits, the evidence is on hand for the assertion that a specific syndrome exists that includes anti-Semitism, prejudice in general, politico-economic conservatism, and a variety of other anti-democratic attitudes, and that there is therefore a type of personality which may be called “authoritarian.”

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The extraordinarily elaborate and detailed statistical methods used to validate every step in the process of reasoning almost disarm criticism; one fears being accused of quibbling, if one takes exception to certain details of procedure. Nevertheless, before proceeding with the discussion of the essential contribution of this volume, the writer would like to set down several reservations, some of which may be worth careful study by more competent critics.

First, it is important to note that the questionnaires all take a somewhat unusual form: each item is phrased as a strong assertion which is considered anti-Semitic, ethnocentric, or conservative; they express sentiments such as one finds in common conversation or in newspapers. These questionnaires seem completely adequate to the purpose of differentiating those who assent to such expressions from those who do not; but they are perhaps less adequate as statements of the actual content of anti-Semitic, or ethnocentric, or conservative thought. When the researcher, on the basis of a subject’s agreement or disagreement with a series of statements composed by the researcher himself, proceeds to determine the nature of the subject’s thought-processes, is he not moving in a circle? Thus one of the authors, Daniel Levinson, in his discussion of “The Structure of Anti-Semitic Ideology,” writes: “One striking characteristic of the imagery in anti-Semitic ideology is its stereotypy. . . . There is . . . a tendency to over-generalize single traits, to subscribe to statements beginning ‘Jews are . . .’ or ‘The Jews do not. . . .’” However, since the questionnaire itself proposes generalizations in its phrasing of different items, how do we know that this is in fact the “tendency” of anti-Semitic ideology? Is not Professor Levinson here leading the witness?

Second, a number of the items seem to reflect an extreme position as to what ideas are anti-Semitic, or ethnocentric, or conservative. For example: if the subject agrees with the questionnaire statement, “It is wrong for Jews and Gentiles to intermarry,” can that be considered evidence of general anti-Semitism? The authors have what seems to me a very strong answer: it is not they who think certain statements are anti-Semitic; rather, it turns out empirically, that those who agree with these statements also happen to be those who score high on the whole test for anti-Semitism. And there is a further safeguard: the statistical procedure is such that if scores on any individual item do not correlate highly with scores on the total test, that item is dropped. Nevertheless, this procedure could overlook a small minority who would assent to the specific sentiment on purely unemotional and rational grounds: there would not be many such, yet there is something at fault in a point of view which tends to overlook their existence.

It is important to note the general tendency of this and other questions, for it is a tendency which operates throughout the book. The authors proceed on the basis of certain rather simple and single-minded assumptions as to what is progressive or liberal. One example appears above, in their assumption that opposition to intermarriage can only be a sign of prejudice. From other items on the questionnaire, and from general discussion, it is clear that the authors consider religion “reactionary”—unless “modernized” into a general desire to realize ideals.

Again, the authors could answer that the process of correlational analysis removes all initial biases: if these items were not correlated with the general tendency measured by the rest of the scale, they would have been dropped. True enough. But the initial selection, with its unstated political and social assumptions, will rule out many other possible questions that would test other hypotheses. For example, they do not seek to discover whether certain kinds of religious feelings or attitudes might not encourage freedom from authoritarianism. Only two statements on the original “F scale” refer to religion: “The modern church, with its many rules and hypocrisies, does not appeal to the deeply religious person; it appeals mainly to the childish, the insecure, and the uncritical.” “Every person should have a deep faith in some supernatural force higher than himself to which he gives total allegiance and whose decisions he does not question.”

There remains a third caveat: While the correlations between the scores on the different tests are amazingly high—for example, the correlation between the “F” (anti-democratic) and the “E” (ethnocentric) scales is .73—the figures still indicate a sizable number of subjects who score high on one and low on another; and these subjects are for the most part ignored throughout this volume. True, a number of them were included in the group of eighty who were intensively studied by means of interviews—but the characteristics of such people as a group are not given as much consideration as are the characteristics of those who score uniformly high or low. Those who score in the middle on the three scales are given even less consideration. In effect, it is implied that only individuals with extreme and consistent attitudes have clearly defined characters, or play a dynamic role in society. Perhaps. But one wishes the specific character of the moderates and those with mixed attitudes had been taken up at greater length.

But to return to the main line of our discussion: these reservations can hardly be said to withstand the cumulative effect of the statistical procedures. The demonstration of the close relationship between the scales gives ample ground for writing the remaining four parts of the book on the assumption that there is a specific authoritarian personality that may hold the key to our understanding of anti-Semitism.

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But what, then, is the authoritarian personality? The all-important “F scale” tells us part of the story, for it is conveniently divided into nine clusters of items, and these nine characteristics are one way of defining the authoritarian personality. Here they are, in the authors’ own words:

Conventionalism: Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values.

Authoritarian submission: Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the in-group.

Authoritarian Aggression: Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values.

Anti-intraception: Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded.

Superstition and stereotype: The belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories.

Power and ‘toughness’: Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures, over-emphasis upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness.

Destructiveness and cynicism: Generalized hostility, vilification of the human.

Projectivity: The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.

Sex: Exaggerated concern with sexual ‘goings-on’.

But why and how does the authoritarian personality develop these traits? Why and how do the researchers—even before they begin testing—assume that these traits will be shown by authoritarian types?

Because they proceed on the basis of an elaborate theory of the psychological development of authoritarian and non-authoritarian types—and this set of attitudes can be deduced from this theory. The latter can be traced back at least as far as Erich Fromm’s contribution to Authority and the Family, where he developed the notion of a “sado-masochistic” type and a theory of its relation to contemporary society. Here, in The Authoritarian Personality, this notion is much more fully developed. In Part II, Dr. Else Frenkel-Brunswik proceeds directly to the testing of it by means of a close analysis of the interviews that were conducted with eighty individuals—forty-five prejudiced and thirty-five unprejudiced, divided equally between men and women—who were selected from the original 2,099 subjects for further intensive study. And on the basis of her analysis, she presents the following excellent summary of the theory of the developmental patterns which produce authoritarian and non-authoritarian types:

When we consider the childhood situation of the most prejudiced subjects, we find reports of a tendency toward rigid discipline on the part of the parents, with affection which is conditional rather than unconditional, i.e., dependent upon approved behavior on the part of the child. Related to this is a tendency . . . to base inter-relationships on rather closely defined roles of dominance and submission, in contradistinction to equalitarian policies. . . .

Forced into a surface submission to parental authority [because of this harsh discipline], the child develops hostility and aggression which are poorly channelized. The displacement of a repressed antagonism toward authority may be . . . the principal source of his antagonism toward out-groups. . . .

Fear and dependency seem to discourage the ethnocentric child from conscious criticism of the parents. It is especially the prejudiced man who seems intimidated by a threatening father figure. Display of a rough masculine facade seems to be a compensation for such an intimidation. . . . [The woman, on the other hand, responds with conventional ‘feminine’ behavior. But for both we find a] rigid repression of hostility against parents [which] may be accompanied by an occasional breaking through of drives in a crude and unsocialized form. . . .

The fact that the negative feelings against the parents have to be excluded from consciousness may be considered as contributing to the general lack of insight, rigidity of defense, and narrowness of the ego so characteristic of high scorers. Since the unprejudiced child as a rule does not seem to have to submit to stern authority . . . he can afford in later life to do without strong authority, and he does not need to assert his strength against those who are weaker. . . .

The parents of prejudiced subjects . . . also tend toward preoccupation with problems of status. . . . What is socially accepted and what is helpful in the climbing of the social ladder is considered good, and what deviates, what is different, and what is socially inferior is considered bad. . . .

[The prejudiced person therefore] expects—and gives—social approval on the basis of external moral values including cleanliness, politeness, and the like. He condemns others for their nonconformity to such values. . . . The functioning of his superego is mainly directed toward punishment, condemnation, and the exclusion of others, thus mirroring the type of discipline to which he himself was apparently exposed. . . .

The low scorer seems more oriented toward love and less toward power than is the high scorer. The former is more capable of giving affection since he has received more real affection. He tends to judge people more on the basis of their intrinsic worth than on the basis of conformity to social mores. . . . As a child, he seems to have enjoyed the benefit of the help of adults in working out his problems of sex and aggression. He thus can more easily withstand propaganda which defames minorities and glorifies war. By virtue of the greater integration of his instinctual life, he becomes a more creative and sublimated individual. He is thus more flexible and less likely to form stereotyped opinions about others. . . . He is able to express disagreement with, and resentment against, the parents more openly, thus achieving a much greater degree of independence from the parent and from authorities in general. . . .

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If now we refer back to the nine characteristics which the original “F scale” tried to find in the authoritarian type, we can see how each of these nine may be seen as a natural organic growth from this development pattern: the authoritarian are conventional because of their original need to conform, under a strong, status-oriented, parental discipline; they are submissive to authority because of the same reason; they are “anti-intraceptive”—afraid of the subjective and the imaginative—because of their need to suppress their own aggressive strivings, and their fear of what they may discover by looking into themselves; and so on through the list.

We know, from the high inter-correlation of the items on the “F scale” and the high correlation of this scale with the other scales, that we have a pattern here: but where is our direct evidence that the developmental theory which explains the pattern is correct? We have an astonishing number of bits of empirical evidence—principally from the interviews, but also elsewhere—that support the outline of the developmental pattern we have just quoted.

For example: We find, in the interviews, that the prejudiced uniformly say their parents are the most wonderful in the world, and practically never breathe a word of criticism about them, while the unprejudiced quite often criticize their parents and refer to them as “ordinary people.” However, we also find that in the “TAT” test—where a person is supposed to reveal something of his unconscious feelings by telling stories about pictures with which he is presented—that the prejudiced are full of violence and aggression and suspicion against parental figures, while the unprejudiced tell stories which indicate confidence toward such figures.

Again: we find (this time in the questionnaires) that those who disagree with their parents’ political views—no matter what the direction of this disagreement, apparently—are also somewhat less prejudiced than those who agree.

Again: we find, in the interviews, that the prejudiced are oriented toward their fathers, as the principal figure in the family constellation, while the unprejudiced are oriented toward their mothers. Fathers, we know in general but can also see from the interviews, symbolize power; mothers symbolize love. (In a number of cases, indeed, the prejudiced have lost mothers in childhood, while there are no such cases among the unprejudiced.)

It is such items of evidence, extracted by a brilliant analysis of the interviews, that strongly support the total picture of the origin of the authoritarian personality given by Dr. Frenkel-Brunswik.

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The analysis thus far is unquestionably a purely psychological one. All along, however, we have been warned that we cannot see the problem of authoritarianism and prejudice in psychological terms alone. The social background in which it should be placed is left undefined in this book: yet we are assured that it is important, and it is assumed as a matter of course that it is known: that is, that there exist real relations between different social factors that the rational man can discern, and that the failure to discern them can be the result only of psychological inadequacy or of a social atmosphere in which the true structure of reality is purposely disguised.

This is one of the major assumptions made in Part IV of the book, written by Professor T. W. Adorno, which is its only non-statistical section and consists of an analysis of the ideological patterns revealed in the interviews. This is at once the most brilliant and most debatable part of the volume. What is brilliant is its analysis in detail of the ideas of the authoritarian type of personality. What is debatable is the point of view it tends to reveal in passing.

To turn first to the analysis: Take, for example, the common remark of the anti-Semite who shakes his head at the state of the world and says: “There’s going to be bloodshed.” Note, says Professor Adorno, that this phrase avoids saying that Gentiles will shed Jewish blood: the implication remains that, conceivably, Jews may shed Gentile blood. By allowing this as a possibility, the anti-Semite simultaneously gives himself a justification for what he would like to see done to Jews, But then, too, he does like the idea of bloodshed in general. “On the deepest level,” says Professor Adorno, “they do not distinguish between subject and object. The underlying destructive urge pertains to the enemy and to oneself. Destructiveness is truly ‘totalitarian’.”

We could report many more such analyses of simple elements of ideology, with the astonishing wealth of meaning they uncover. But let us proceed to what we consider debatable.

Professor Adorno believes that we “are living in potentially fascist times,” and this assumption pervades the book. The “F scale,” it will be recalled, is supposed to measure “pre-fascist” traits. One cannot help but feel that this hypothesis remains independent of empirical results, whether or not they support it. For example, Professor Adorno writes: “A large number of . . . constituents of political ideology . . . seem to permeate [both prejudiced and unprejudiced], while, by their own momentum, making for potentially fascist persuasions. Here belong . . . general ignorance and confusion in political matters, the habits of ‘ticket thinking’ and ‘personalization,’ resentment of unions, of government interference in business, of income limitations, and a number of other trends.”

Can it be demonstrated that “resentment of unions” or of “income limitations” are “potentially fascist persuasions”? Here one would not be convinced by the argument that they are correlated with other points of view that are undeniably fascist. For why may not these attitudes conceivably be the ones in a generally authoritarian personality that offer hope for action in behalf of democracy? If a person is resentful of unions he may be resentful of what he conceives of as an illegitimate infringement of his liberties; perhaps he is protecting his individuality, his sense of his own capacity to make his own way, perhaps he thinks he is resisting becoming part of a mass. Similarly, even in this book one can find evidence indicating that resentment of the limitation of one’s income may not be a pre-fascist trait; for example, the non-authoritarians are more interested in sensual and material pleasures, less interested in status and power, than the authoritarians. And in fact, is not income sought for pleasure as well as status and power?

My point is that in a passage such as the one quoted, and in others, there are many assumptions as to the structure of the given social reality in which we live that are not examined; or, if examined, there is no support given for the point of view taken. There is rather a faith that social science will—or perhaps already has—discovered how society works and how its trends are related to each other. With this faith the authors can label as irrational—and therefore inadequate—attitudes whose irrationality is by no means demonstrated.

Against this objection, it could be argued that it is not within the scope of this book to determine the social background of the authoritarian personality, or to judge the actual, rational adequacy of political viewpoints. As we may read in the final chapter, “We have not . . . gone into the social and economic processes that . . . determine the development of characteristic family patterns.” Yet very often one or another of the authors writes as if he, or someone else, had done so, and in addition to pointing out the empirical relation between attitudes he will go oh to criticize certain attitudes directly, as if the major political and economic tendencies of our society, with their implications, have already been established.

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To sum up: this impressive volume demonstrates that anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism and conservatism, are, in large measure, the external characteristics of a certain type of personality widely prevalent in our society. It also suggests what personal history, and what type of family, may produce this authoritarian type. It does not, however, demonstrate the relations of this type to the larger structures of society. It does not, for example, find any relation between occupation, class position, or income, and authoritarianism; nor can it say whether or not large-scale social changes would significantly change the frequency of the authoritarian type in our society.

The authors do state their belief that exclusively psychological measures would be woefully inadequate as a means of enabling larger numbers of people to develop a non-authoritarian character structure, and that social changes of some specific type would be more efficacious. It would certainly be worthwhile to carry the investigation further along these lines, even though it seems very difficult to ascertain just what measures would be beneficial in practice and what measures would be harmful. It is much easier to study what is—and the authoritarian personality is—than to study what the actual effect of certain social developments, as yet only hypothetical, would be.

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We have yet to consider—and we can do so only briefly—the two additional volumes on the personality of the anti-Semite in the “Studies in Prejudice” series. Dynamics of Prejudice, by Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, is a study of a random sampling of some one hundred and fifty veterans in Chicago, all of them former enlisted men, and none of them Negroes or Jews. Every man was given a long clinical interview ranging over many questions, and then the results were statistically analyzed in terms of various categories.

The most significant results are two: (1) those veterans who are successful in their careers are the least prejudiced; those who are unsuccessful are the most prejudiced; and (2) the prejudiced seem characterized by what are called “inadequate controls” and a “lack of ego-strength.”

The first result is simple to understand and easy to interpret. It is the second that offers many problems, and it is not easy to disentangle the purely verbal from the substantial ones. It seems that those men who reject army discipline, who reject what are called “controlling institutions” (government, the powers-that-be in general, the status quo), are prone to prejudice. “Intolerance, like hating the army,” write Drs, Bettelheim and Janowitz, “is an expression of the same body of underlying tendencies, namely, a dissatisfaction with existing society, which expresses itself through all channels available.”

The unprejudiced, on the other hand, appear to think that society—the government, the army, religion, and so on—are all right.

Superficially, this seems to contradict the results of The Authoritarian Personality—for there we read that it is those who accept society as it is, who approve of its values, and who conform and are conventional, who are the prejudiced; while it is just those who rebel against it, who reject its values, who do not conform and are unconventional, who are the unprejudiced.

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In part, the contradiction can be resolved by reference to the social classes of the subjects each study concentrates on. The veterans belong on the whole to the working class or a similar group. The sampling in the California study, while it includes a considerable number of working people, is in largest part middle-class. Conceivably, then, the conforming middle-class person is anti-Semitic, and the conforming working-class person is not; while the non-conforming middle-class person is not anti-Semitic, and the non-conforming lower-class person is. If this is indeed the situation, one might well find reasons to explain it. For example, non-conformity in the middle class might be considered the expression of a rational outlook toward the world that sees through conventional values as inconsistent, harmful, and irrelevant; this would be the outlook of an unprejudiced person. In the less favored lower classes, non-conformity might be the sign of a resentful personality, rather than an enlightened one, and the resentment here would tend to well up and spill over on institutional authorities and all other conspicuous targets.

All this is highly speculative, and both sides might reject this resolution of their conflict. Looking now at another phase, however, we find that the family pattern which Drs. Bettelheim and Janowitz believe to be the cause of a disorganized ego and lack of self-control (to paraphrase their technical terms) turns out to be more or less the same pattern that the writers of The Authoritarian Personality believe leads to too much submission to controls—that is, a family characterized by harsh discipline, deficiency of love, failure to properly “internalize” parental values, and so on. Thus the two groups of researchers find that the same familial matrix produces opposite types of personality: the Chicago study sees a personality that lacks controls, the California study sees a personality that submits itself to controls that are too rigid and inflexible. Oddly enough, both conclusions correspond respectively with popular notions of the effects of lower-class child-rearing on the one hand and of middle-class child-rearing on the other. And they also correspond with facts as to the types of mental disorders and crimes characteristic of the two classes: in the lower class, psychosis and crimes of passion, in the middle class, neurosis and crimes of calculation. Perhaps, then, our original hypothesis that the differences in the two studies are caused by differences in the predominant class affiliations of the subjects is sound.

We may propose another hypothesis: that the Chicago and the California studies do not have opposing results, but really tap different layers of the personality. And since each Chicago interview lasted, on the average, at least two or three times as long as each California interview, this is by no means an arbitrary assumption. This hypothesis clears up the difficulties in the following way. Both the Chicago and the California groups agree that a major initial frustration in one’s childhood (harsh discipline, lack of love), leads to strong aggressions, unreleased hostility, and a failure of “internalization.” Now the Chicago group believes that this aggression and hostility is released directly against both ethnic groups and “controlling institutions”—the forces of the status quo. But the California group believes that the aggression and hostility are inhibited by fear of the power of the father, first, and then of the controlling institutions; this produces surface conformity, but underneath uncontrollable violence and hostility—“an occasional breaking through of drives in a crude and unsocialized form”—can be found. Is it not possible that the Chicago group plumbed directly to this layer of the personality and decided that the aggression formed there was a more important determinant of attitudes than the psychic forces suppressing the aggression?

However, these are purely hypothetical resolutions of the contradictions involved: it is conceivable that they may be refuted and that the conclusions of the two studies will remain irreconcilable.

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But there is still another disagreement between the Chicago and California studies, and this one cannot be bridged even speculatively. Here we have to do with differences of conviction rather than scientific findings. The disagreement is in answering the question: what should be done about the aggression and hostility of the prejudiced? Bettelheim and Janowitz, as I see it, emphasize measures of psychological relief—changing the ways of childrearing so that the child will meet with more love and less discipline, more acceptance and less rejection, and thus develop a good control mechanism, and not have to work up so much aggression and hostility that he has to vent them through prejudice. They also propose social measures whose effect would be to reduce strain in adult life—such things as a guaranteed annual wage, for example, that would reduce the number of people whose social position was deteriorating rather than improving. Their aim is social changes that would add to the docile and conforming group, and diminish the wild and non-conforming group.

The authors of The Authoritarian Personality, on the other hand, do not believe psychological measures could be put into effect on a sufficiently large scale: “What,” they ask, “of parents who with the best will and the best feelings are thwarted by the need to mold the child so that he will find a place in the world as it is? Few parents can be expected to persist for long in educating their children for a society that does not exist, or even in orienting themselves toward goals which they share only with a minority.” And those social measures which the Chicago group feels can lead to greater security on the part of the individual, the California group would consider mere palliatives that are unable to check the trend to a fascist society.

Essentially, the difference boils down to a judgment as to the kind of society we live in. The Chicago group believes we live in what is fundamentally a benign society, in which conformity and acceptance represent psychic health, non-conformity and rebellion represent disorder. To this, the California group answers: “We must object . . . strenuously to the [hypothesis] which equates conformity with psychic health, non-conformity with psychic disturbance. . . . If good external adjustment is to be psychologically healthy, it must be in response to an environment which sufficiently gratifies the most important needs of the individual.” And this environment, it is the firm view of the California group, our present society does not provide.

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Our third volume, Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder by Nathan Ackerman and Marie Jahoda, leans mildly toward the view of The Authoritarian Personality. The word to emphasize is “mildly,” for this book is an eminently reasonable one, and avoids excess and dogma in a field where these are rife. Its thesis is that, to examine the psychological roots of prejudice, we had best go to those who have made the most thorough and complete psychological examinations, the psychoanalysts. The authors got a number of psychoanalysts to provide them with very full reports on those of their patients who showed, or had shown, anti-Semitic symptoms. To the twenty-seven case histories thus gathered, thirteen more persons under treatment by social service agencies were added.

The authors take the greatest care to list all the factors that prevent their results from being in any way decisive. The value of their work, they would be the first to agree, lies in its experimental and pioneer effort to make use of a large number of psychoanalytic records for social research purposes, rather than in any definite conclusions one might draw from it as to the causes or nature of anti-Semitism.

Therefore it is all the more interesting to come across many points in the Ackerman and Jahoda book that corroborate details in the other two studies: thus, their subjects show a weakness of insight, and a great ease of “projectivity” in which the “unwanted parts of the self” are “projected” onto Jews or Negroes, and so on. Drs. Ackerman and Jahoda also emphasize the importance of the lack of love in childhood as a cause of adult prejudice. They make the excellent point that the intensity of a prejudiced attitude derives less from the total personality than from the social group to which one belongs. In the middle class, violent prejudice is taboo; in the lower class, it is a matter of course. The social situation plays an enormous role by permitting and evoking anti-Semitism: personality is not the whole story.

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How might one sum up the contribution of these studies? Like most of the achievements of social science, the California study ends up by precipitating a type, fully delineated and elaborated, out of a mass of apparently unrelated data—a specific, concrete product of history which plays a significant role in our society. The authoritarian type of personality becomes as real to us now, and becomes as ubiquitous a part of our thinking, as Marx’s “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat,” or Weber’s “traditional” and “bureaucratic” society.

But we must be clear as to the nature of this type: it is psychological, the product fundamentally of family environment. Certainly it must be related to the larger social forms of our society: but as to the specific relation it has to these larger forms, the evidence in this book is inconclusive. The presence of authoritarianism, the authors find, does not have a high correlation with social background, occupation, income, education, religion, or any other major social factor. Thus, authoritarianism cannot be said to be the typical syndrome of the middle class or the workers, or more characteristic of one or another social or economic group—it correlates only with other psychological patterns and with certain psychological factors in personal development.

Nor is this psychological type related very closely to the dynamic movement of society, to social trends-and social changes. We still need to know what effect depression and prosperity, war and peace, or any other social changes have on the behavior of authoritarian types, or on the chances that larger or smaller numbers of them will be “created” by society. All this must be left for future study, or for speculation.

Practically, the authoritarian type demonstrates to us that the instinct of liberal and minority groups in the past few decades was sound—anti-Semitism, anti-Negroism, anti-foreignism, are linked; furthermore, we can actually tell from the gross patterns of personality what kind of people are most likely to turn out anti-Semitic. Here the most painstaking procedures have shown that to a considerable extent “it all hangs together.” We will be right, most of the time, in dismissing the democratic protestations of a political figure who is a violent opponent of foreigners and immigration: and we should not be too much surprised to see him turn up in the anti-Semitic camp.

Far more should be said about these books; we have sought here only to give the outline of a massive work, and to suggest some of the lines which closer study and analysis might find it profitable to follow. Our thinking on the whole subject of prejudice in modern society is immeasurably richer by the possession of this new, major theory, and the impressive scientific evidence marshalled in its support; and these volumes will undoubtedly bear further fruit in the studies and investigations they will inspire. Certainly the paths opened up by this pioneering thinking and research are worth the fullest exploration.

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¹ See “The Social Scientists Dissect Prejudice,” COMMENTARY, May 1946.

² Reviewed in COMMENTARY, February 1950 and March 1950, respectively.