Adorno and Authoritarianism

Abstract The 2019 reissue of The Authoritarian Personality, to which Adorno contributed as part of a research team, has rejuvenated the critical conversation about Adorno and authoritarianism at a time when Adorno’s concern about the potential for the United States to “slide into fascism” might be interpreted as prognostication. In particular, the new inclusion of Adorno’s critical “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality,” omitted from the original publication of the text in 1950, works against the decades-old misinterpretation of the study as understanding authoritarianism to be a primarily psychological phenomenon—a misinterpretation that persists into the present in analyses that attribute too much causal and explanatory power to individuals’ dispositions in the genesis of authoritarianism, and emphasize the Fascist (F) scale’s applicability to contemporary right-wing demagogues. Adorno consistently maintained that the roots of “a fascistically inclined mentality … extend deep into the structure of [the] society that generates [it].” In this chapter, I revisit the complexities attendant upon Adorno’s participation in the AP study, given especially his conflictual relationship to American empirical research and his prediction that, in a society full of types, psychology would become obsolete. I critically explore contemporary engagements with Adorno on authoritarianism, ultimately arguing that Adorno’s own insistence on looking to the objective dimension of authoritarian tendencies invites acknowledgement of the limitations of his work in diagnosing antidemocratic trends today—particularly in the United States, due to his relative inattention to the arguably authoritarian history of anti-Black racism.