Page - 21 - in Rebels without a cause? - ‘Criminals’ and fascism in The Authoritarian Personality

Kranebitter 21 admirers don’t want to believe he actually made them’ (Marasco, 2018: 792). The history of the San Quentin interviews simply does not allow this conclusion. Rather the division runs through the whole study, including those parts written by Adorno. Rolf Wiggershaus has stated that Adorno, interviewing radio listeners during Paul Lazarsfeld’s Radio Project, had observed from a position of maximum distance (cf. Wiggershaus, 1988: 276). The San Quentin interviews reproduced this position of distance from those taking part in the study. The consequence was the compulsive and relentless schematisation of their statements, with little attention paid to contextual problems of sampling or the inter- view situation. The TAP authors ran the risk of adhering rigidly to their basic assumption that ‘criminals’ would turn out to be high scorers and embryonic storm troopers; to con- firm this, design and results had to be adapted. The purpose of this article was not to join the chorus of those demonising The Authoritarian Personality because of its actual or alleged methodological shortcomings. Rather it was to investigate the study’s blind spot, namely the un-reflected models of thought influenced by criminological discourse at the time and ideas around ‘criminals’ and fascism. Only the reconstruction of these models of thought, an anamnesis of their genesis, or in other words, only the search for what ‘was self-evident with Adorno, what he tacitly assumed in his analyses and interpretations’ (Steinert, 1989: 157) and a work- ing through of self-evident facts can enable further work on and reconnection with this stimulating exploration of authoritarianism in all its facets. Acknowledgements I want to thank Christian Fleck, Arno Pilgram and Joanna White as well as the five anonymous review- ers for the many suggestions, corrections, and comments that substantially improved this paper. Declaration of conflicting interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article: The archival research for this article was made possible by a 2019– 2020 William J. Lowenberg Memorial Fellowship on America, the Holocaust, and the Jews at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for the project, ‘Surveying Mass Murder: GIs and the Production of Sociological Knowledge about the Nazi Concentration Camps.’ ORCID iD Andreas Kranebitter https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5164-3271 Notes 1. An extended German version of this historical-sociological reconstruction, focusing on its consequences for criminological research on authoritarian attitudes, will be published in Kriminologisches Journal (forthcoming).