Page - 3 - in Rebels without a cause? - ‘Criminals’ and fascism in The Authoritarian Personality

Kranebitter 3 discussion of a fascist personality. In the rest of the study, the word ‘fascist’ is mostly replaced by terms such as ‘anti-democratic’ and ‘authoritarian’. The thesis that ‘criminals’ were particularly authoritarian was not confirmed in later empirical surveys in prisons. Some 30 years after the original study, the Australian soci- ologist Ray (1972) used a revised form of the F-scale to survey authoritarian attitudes among 70 prisoners within a Sydney prison. His conclusion read: ‘Particularly when their low level of education is considered, criminals are extremely anti-authority in their attitudes. [. . .] Criminals (recidivist prisoners) are in every sense extreme anti-authori- tarians’ (Ray, 1984: 269f.). Ray, like other authors before him (Hyman and Sheatsley, 1954), traced the opposite findings in The Authoritarian Personality back to deficiencies in the construction of the F-scale, which did not differentiate between traditional con- servatism, authoritarianism, aggression, and violence, and could not prevent acquies- cence bias due to the exclusively positive phrasing of the questions. In this article, I will focus on the influence of the prison situation on the study’s theo- retical argument. I will argue that this influence remained unreflected in both the ques- tionnaire situation and the clinical interviews.1 By contrasting the published version of Morrow’s interviews in San Quentin with an earlier draft written in 1947 or 1948 found in the AJC archives (Morrow, n.d.),2 methodological problems in the study can be high- lighted which have not remained without consequences for its theoretical conclusions. As will be discussed in the second part of this article, Morrow and Adorno interpreted the evidence not within the theoretical framework of Erich Fromm’s reading of psychoa- nalysis, but within that of psychoanalytic literature on crime current at the time, in par- ticular Robert Lindner’s ‘hypnoanalysis’ with a ‘psychopathic personality’ (Lindner, 1944: 1). Difficulties in the data collection process were neglected and contradictions within the data were smoothed in order to make the evidence fit a very specific psycho- analytical theory of crime as unresolved oedipal conflicts. Focusing on these shortcom- ings of the study, so runs the underlying thesis of this article, makes it possible to appreciate its inspiring findings. However, a discussion of the many other important influences on the study The Authoritarian Personality is beyond the scope of this article. William Morrow’s interviews in the San Quentin penitentiary Potential fascists: The Authoritarian Personality The war was not over yet when Frenkel-Brunswik, Sanford and Levinson on the one hand and Horkheimer and Adorno on the other combined their previously separate research on anti-Semitism and began working on The Authoritarian Personality for the AJC. The historical background to the study was both the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in the US. In its unpublished study Anti-Semitism among American Labor, the Institute for Social Research had already found that in 1944, right in the middle of the war against Nazi Germany, 18% of respondents had assessed the persecution of Jews in Germany as posi- tive (Ziege, 2009: 212). The Nazi extermination of the European Jews continued to pro- mote anti-Semitic hatred, even among Americans, until 1947 (Ziege, 2009: 91–93). The