The Authoritarian Personality

By Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson , R. Nevitt Sanford

Book cover of The Authoritarian Personality

Book description

What makes a fascist? Are there character traits that make someone more likely to vote for the far right? The Authoritarian Personality, written in the shadow of Fascism and the Holocaust, looked to analyse the rise of Fascism in Europe through the specific psychological traits that make people prone to…

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1 author picked The Authoritarian Personality as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Katy Hull

Author

This book is both timeless and a product of a specific moment (the post-war era). First to the timeless stuff: the authoritarian personality that Adorno and his co-authors describe remains alive and kicking in 2022. He is obsessed with appearing tough, power-hungry, incapable of self-criticism, and presents himself as a victim of other peoples’ malfeasance. As for the more dated stuff, Freud lurks behind the authors’ interpretations; reading this book, I am struck by how differently post-war Americans understood gender and sexuality than we do today. This book poses searching questions about the extent to which authoritarianism and proto-fascism are…

From Katy's list on the history of extremism in the United States.