Page - 4 - in Rebels without a cause? - ‘Criminals’ and fascism in The Authoritarian Personality

4 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0) victims were blamed for being annihilated. The Authoritarian Personality was therefore concerned with how open respondents were to fascist political patterns and it sought to investigate the psychological dispositions of ‘potential fascists’ in the US (Adorno et al., 1950: 1–5). It was an urgent task, one not yet externalised from social science as Vergangenheitsbewältigung or ‘coping with the past’ (Kranebitter and Reinprecht, 2020). The major finding of the study was that an individual prejudice was symptomatic of an entire system of thought, which was no longer based on individual experience. The F-scale test started with questionnaire items that asked direct questions about anti-Sem- itism (A-S-scale) and ethnocentrism (E-scale), before moving on to indirect items, that is, questions that corresponded to the direct questions of the other scales but did not immediately reveal their purpose (F-scale). In this scale, the underlying dimensions of authoritarianism were identified as a rigid adherence to middle class values (convention- alism), an authoritarian submission to the idealised moral authority of an in-group, an authoritarian aggression towards those who violate the rules, anti-intraception, supersti- tion and stereotypy, an orientation towards power and hardness, a general destructive- ness and cynicism, as well as a comprehensive and far-reaching projectivity and, finally, an overemphasis on sexuality (Adorno et al., 1950: 222–279). As a result, people who had achieved high levels of approval on these items, so-called high scorers, were termed authoritarian personalities. Adorno always emphasised that these dimensions were not neatly separable factors (Adorno, 2019: 43) but could only be understood as a totality – projectivity does not exist without aggression, aggression not without frustration, etc. The authoritarian syndrome of the authoritarian personality was therefore not reified as a fixed, essentialised determinant of action but rather was understood as a manifestation of past social forces in the individual psyche, as a relatively organised and coherent, if contradictory, set of attitudes. The unconscious forces of personality should be under- stood as ‘readinesses for responses’ (Adorno et al., 1950: 5f.). Horkheimer and Adorno described this stereotypical thinking ‘in blocks’, which corresponds to the monopoly phase of capitalism in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, as ‘ticket thinking’. Here, as in an election, a candidate is chosen as part of an entire ticket: anti-Semitism comes as part of an industrially produced set of attitudes, one ready for consumption by individuals inca- pable of individual experience who, due to their real alienation from the promises of capitalism, need an object onto which they can project their deep-seated feelings of hatred (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1969: 214–217; cf. Ziege, 2009). The criminal ‘high scorer’: Reasoning and results William R. Morrow was responsible for issuing the questionnaires to prisoners in San Quentin. Morrow was part of a whole group of junior scientists who carried out and interpreted the study’s interviews, yet whose names remained invisible in the famous ‘Adorno et al.’ reference (cf. Fahrenberg and Steiner, 2004). The methodological procedure in San Quentin corresponded by and large to the pro- cedure carried out with other groups. The questionnaires were distributed among a large number of group members; individual high and low scorers were then selected on the basis of their E-scale values and were the subjects of in-depth ‘clinical’ interviews. In San Quentin, 110 prisoners completed the 45-item version of the questionnaire in October