Mitchell G. Ash

Creation of 'The Authoritarian Personality'

This Palgrave Pivot presents a new account of the social and epistemic processes that led to the creation of The Authoritarian Personality (TAP), a classic of political psychology published in 1950, which has been cited frequently in recent literature on authoritarian political parties and movements. Studies of the intellectual migration of European scholars and scientists to the United States have recognized TAP as one of the most successful results of the multiple efforts by émigrés and their American colleagues to reflect on the wider implications of the Nazi takeover of power, as well as the issue of whether and why elements of Nazi racism and antisemitism existed in America. However, the work is generally treated as part of the history of the Frankfurt School, and discussion has centered on the contribution of Theodor W. Adorno, whose chapters encompass less than one-fourth of the volume. This narrow perspective largely ignores the intensive collaboration between the Institute of Social Research in New York and the Public Opinion Study Group in Berkeley, California, and also among the four authors themselves. This is particularly true for the central contribution of the émigré Austrian psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik to TAP, which had little to do with the approach of the Frankfurt School. This book therefore investigates in detail the social circumstances that led to the creation of TAP, and pays equal attention to the work of all of TAP's authors, including the two Americans who wrote more than half the volume. It also considers whether and how the authors' ideas and methods interlinked in the volume itself, as well as how the approach of TAP relates to other research on antisemitism and ethnic prejudice in the USA during the 1940s.