Page - 14 - in Rebels without a cause? - ‘Criminals’ and fascism in The Authoritarian Personality

14 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0) crime, the classic recidivist (Hofinger, 2015), hence the label of ‘psychopath’ who is ultimately a sociopath in his antisocial behaviour. The understanding of psychoanalysis as a technique without reference to social theory is astonishing. The basic theoretical assumption is that the psychopath is simply an indi- vidual unwilling to work and to adapt to capitalism. ‘It follows naturally that those goals which are realised by the psychopath [. . .] are initially anti-social’ (Lindner, 1944: 4). Every problem lies with the delinquent himself: he is aimless and lacking in motivation, cannot integrate into an unproblematic status quo, and does not accept his assigned role. This creates frustration, which drives him to violent acts. The psychopath flees, is a wan- derer and nomad, the ‘anti-social’ per se. When Harold reports that his sister would like to get married within her class, adding that he would not like to do so due to his parents’ negative example and condemning the wish to retain your class position when marrying, Lindner plainly states: ‘The inability of the psychopath to cherish class loyalties and his continual struggle to change his class is a generalized symptom. [. . .] The psychopath wants to change his class’ (Lindner, 1944: 126). The misplaced, ‘outclassed’ desire is not read as a classic manifestation of the American Dream but labelled as psychopathic. According to the psychiatrist, Harold should, like his sister, simply be ‘loyal’ to his hope- less class position, without any attempt to change it. To sum up: the obsession with the status quo, with a generalised conventionalism, is shown by the psychiatrist, not the patient. The implicit social theory underlying all the individualising and pathologising is thus extremely conservative. Lindner, not Harold, destructively paints too gloomy a picture, just like TAP’s typical high scorers. Thinking himself in an anti-fascist struggle, the illusion is a delusion – the hypothesis of the unstoppable ‘heavy-booted march of psychopathy’ (Lindner, 1944: 16). ‘This is the men- ace of psychopathy: The psychopath is not only a criminal, he is the embryonic Storm- Trooper; he is the disinherited, betrayed antagonist whose aggressions can be mobilised on the instant’ (Lindner, 1944: 16), if only the right ‘leader’ shows up. This hypothesis of a strong correlation between ‘criminal’ behaviour and fascism is adopted in The Authoritarian Personality – the cost of which is taking on all the ballast of Lindner’s poetics and conservative social theory. Borrowing his untested hypothesis, the TAP authors felt vindicated. ‘[W]e see here, as we saw in Germany, the recruiting ground for a Fascist movement’ (Levinson and Morrow, 1946: 2f.); ‘These considera- tions are in accord with the well-known role of criminal types in fascist movements; they are the “plug-uglies” who are assigned the task of terrorizing minority group members, active labour unionists, liberals, and radicals’ (Adorno et al., 1950: 817). The tragedy of this view lies in the fact that it is empirically incorrect and based on a classic, as well as classist, prejudice. Just as the unemployed did not constitute the NSDAP’s voter base (Falter, 1991: 299), convicted criminals and recidivists did not form the core of National Socialist combat organisations, rather they were deported to concentration camps by the Criminal Police in large numbers (cf. Kranebitter, 2019; Wachsmann, 2006; Wagner, 1996). The thesis is a stereotypical fantasy, not an empirically valid judgment. The point here, polemically speaking, is that embryonic fascism was found not within ‘the crimi- nal’, but rather within criminological theory and practice. For Lindner, ‘[h]istory has assigned to this country and her allies the task of cleansing civilisation of the predatory creature whose typical history is presented in this volume’