All of these concerns were funneled into the most comprehensive study of the irrational nature of the modern individual, The Authoritarian Personality, a collaborative investigation commissioned by the American Jewish Committee and authored by Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford. The project was initiated in 1944 after Max Horkheimer was appointed head of the Department of Scientific Research for the American Jewish Committee and helped to launch a five-volume study on modern anti-Semitism titled Studies in Prejudice.12 Because of its experimentation with depth psychology and projective testing, The Authoritarian Personality became the definitive postwar study of modern prejudice. Initially restricted to a small sampling of female students at the University of California, the study was expanded to include an examination of the psychological dispositions of middle-class professionals, psychiatric patients at a California clinic, working-class men and women in local unions, members of parent-teacher associations, church groups, women’s clubs, inmates at the San Quentin State Prison, female public school teachers and social workers, and students at the University of Oregon and George Washington University.
Finding themselves “in perfect agreement with the description of the authoritarian character given by Fromm and Maslow,” Adorno and his collaborators argued that the increasing isolation of the modern individual had become a breeding ground for compulsive conformity.13 Rejecting the assumption that latent authoritarian tendencies were apparent only in overt action or consciously stated opinions, the authors turned to psychology to investigate those “established patterns of hope and aspirations, fears and anxieties that dispose [individuals] to certain beliefs and make them resistant to others” (10). Most influential was the development of the famous F-scale, an attitudinal scale that measured the presence of “antidemocratic tendencies at the personality level” (223). Through a series of clinical interviews, thematic apperception tests, and detailed questionnaires, the F-scale was supposedly able to measure the authoritarian potential of individuals according to a series of traits that included a rigid adherence to conventional values, a submissive attitude toward authorities, and an overly aggressive reaction to outsiders. Although these traits were not comprehensive of “all the features of this personality pattern,” they did, according to the book’s authors, form “a more or less enduring structure in the person that renders him receptive to antidemocratic propaganda” (228). Such receptivity was linked to the psychological weakening of the individual. The apparent causes were numerous, including widespread ignorance about the current economic and political situation and a growing inability to balance the conflicting psychic demands of internal and external forces. This last conclusion became the dominant paradigm for most discussions of authoritarianism. As the study explained, “weakness in the ego is expressed in the inability to build up a consistent and enduring set of moral values within the personality; and it is the state of affairs, apparently, that makes it necessary for the individual to seek some organizing and coordinating agency outside of himself” (234). Thus, ego weakness was marked by several character traits, including an opposition to introspection, a prejudiced use of stereotypes, and a revulsion against individual weakness.
Reactions in the United States to the study were overwhelmingly positive. In his 1950 Commentary review, Nathan Glazer praised the Studies in Prejudice series (and The Authoritarian Personality in particular) for making scientific research into the subject of prejudice “immeasurably richer” through the analytic methods employed.14 Even Paul Lazarsfeld, who had personal difficulties with Adorno when the two worked together on Lazarsfeld’s Radio Research Project at Princeton University in the late 1930s, praised the methodological achievements of the study. But due to the long delay in publication, the abiding criticism of the book when published in 1950 was its failure to consider the problem of left-wing authoritarianism. For instance, Edward Shils, in his contribution to a 1954 review, Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality,” argued that the recent upsetting of the traditional left-right political dichotomy by both “Fascism and Bolshevism” exposed the limitations of Adorno’s study.15 Of course Adorno, in his more interpretive discussions of character typology, had already noticed this similarity. As he explained, the Berkeley study revealed a number of “‘rigid’ low scorers” who were involved extensively in “some progressive movement” and who exhibited “features of compulsiveness, even of paranoid obsession” that “could hardly be distinguished from some of our high extremes.”16 In fact, Adorno, more than other contributors, often elided the distinction between left-wing and right-wing versions of the authoritarian personality.
Indeed, by the time Cold War anxieties emerged after the Potsdam conference in 1945, the theoretical differences between Fascism and Communism were not easily translatable. The movement of American intellectuals, including many high modernists, from Stalinism to Trotskyism to liberal anti-Communism, particularly in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, has been well documented.17 In 1949, the anti-Communist organization Americans for Intellectual Freedom famously picketed the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, arguing that the conference was merely a façade for pro-Communist organizers. Inspired by the demonstrations and encouraged by anti-Communist intellectuals living in Europe, the Americans for Intellectual Freedom directly led to a much more prominent organization. Founded in 1951, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, an affiliate of the Congress for Cultural Freedom that had been formed the previous year in Berlin, united the various strains of liberal anti-Communism in the United States, counting intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Daniel Bell, James Burnham, Norman Thomas, and Diana Trilling as members. Although the high modernists who joined the American Committee for Cultural Freedom approached the cause of anti-Communism in different ways (Clement Greenberg leading a direct campaign against fellow travelers at the Nation, Lionel Trilling reluctantly supporting investigations into Communist academics at Columbia University, and Allen Tate occasionally writing anti-Communist polemics), all of them saw Communism and Fascism as merely two variants of the same affliction. Even Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, seeing the sources of both ideologies in the regressive tendencies of the Enlightenment, adopted a form of liberal anti-Communism when they returned to Germany in the early 1950s, and both, like their intellectual companions in America, warned against political subversion in their own country.18
Consequently, American critics appropriated the analytic lens of their German counterparts and applied it to the problem of Communism, painting a disturbing portrait of American society as psychologically weak and therefore particularly vulnerable to political infestation. Since the writers of The Authoritarian Personality openly admitted that they had not given Communism “any special attention,” a host of other social scientists rushed to fill in the gaps.19 For instance, psychologist Milton Rokeach, in his book The Open and Closed Mind, extended the F-scale to measure not simply intolerance but also “dogmatism and opinionation,” two traits supposedly shared by Communists and Fascists.20 Examples of this shift in perspective were ubiquitous in American intellectual circles. Beginning in 1953, an anti-Communist liberal organization, The Fund for the Republic, sponsored a scholarly series titled “Communism in American Life.” Most of the volumes, including Theodore Draper’s Roots of American Communism (1957), Robert Iverson’s The Communists and the Schools (1959), and Nathan Glazer’s The Social Basis of American Communism (1961), detailed the influence of the Communist Party in the preceding decades and warned about the irrational allure of authoritarianism. What united these works, along with other independent studies including Irving Howe and Lewis Coser’s The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1957) and Daniel Bell’s Marxian Socialism in the United States (1952), was the common belief that party members were driven by an “orgiastic chiliasm.”21 As Daniel Bell noted, the problem was “explaining the tremendous