Page - 10 - in Rebels without a cause? - ‘Criminals’ and fascism in The Authoritarian Personality

10 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0) while downplaying the importance of conflict in general. This ‘impartiality’ or ‘impuni- tiveness’, which Else Frenkel-Brunswik describes in her chapters as a tendency ‘to refrain from blaming altogether, be it others or oneself’ (Adorno et al., 1950: 409), is seen as an ‘incorrect’ form of the opposite to the punitivity so often seen in high scores. As such, the low scorers’ suppression of all hatred and subsequent derealisation of real conflicts (Adorno et al., 1950: 829) would ultimately lead to an implicit complicity with the status quo, which could also be fascism. Here the subtext was clearly that delinquent low scorers were not ‘real’ low scorers. The real status quo of the low scorers, however, was the prisoner society of San Quentin, not Nazi Germany. This comparison with Morrow’s draft shows that any refer- ence to the prison situation has been deliberately deleted in the publication. For example, one low scorer’s statement that he had no African American friends for fear of sanctions (Adorno et al., 1950: 829) is neatly stripped of references to the prison that were clear in the draft (Morrow, n.d.: 18). The change to this passage is not a negligible semantic detail but an expression of the deletion of the respondent’s socio-historical reality – something explained very well in a deleted footnote: There had been a ‘race riot’ among the inmates only a few months prior to the present interviews. The majority of the white inmates had refused to eat at the same tables with Negroes in the prison cafeteria. This led the prison authority to rescind an order that had just been issued, banning Jim Crow eating practices (Morrow, n.d.: 18) Unfortunately, there are no further enquiries or reports regarding these race riots. But whatever the background context, Morrow was aware of the complex and violent social reality of prison life when he blamed criminal low scorers for their alleged ‘impartiality’ and interpreted it as submission to American elites. ‘Those on top’, however, were fellow prisoners and prison guards in race riot situations. The deletion of the context individu- alised this supposed ‘impartiality’, suggesting precisely the individualised reading of the entire study so often criticised by Adorno (cf. Adorno, 2019; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1975; Gordon 2018). Add-on-aetiology. There were certainly several reasons for the deletions: some remarks were redundant in view of other parts, others contained discussions of criminological literature (which was reduced to a minimum in all parts of the publication). Some parts were probably too openly political, as was the case when Morrow declared liberal ideol- ogy to be more demanding intellectually than conservative agreement with the status quo (Morrow, n.d.: 29f.). Deletions were also made to direct comparisons between post-war America and National Socialism in Germany, which may be attributed to Horkheimer’s great caution in this regard (cf. Wiggershaus, 1988: 237). However, in large part the dele- tions concerned ambiguities and difficulties in data collection – this in a study identify- ing intolerance of ambiguities as a central characteristic of authoritarian personalities. Quite often criticism did not find its way into the published chapter, for example in rela- tion to the psychiatrist Schmidt: ‘The prison situation and especially the psychiatry