propaganda, even for the best possible purpose." Even an "outstanding" sociologist like Robert Lynd confused "thinking with planning" and took the position that social science would "stand or fall on the basis of its serviceability to men as they struggle to live." "Shocked by social injustice," such scholars attempted, "in the spirit of Auguste Comte," to "establish a new social catechism." Their application of the "wisdom of engineering to religion" would prove self-defeating, Horkheimer predicted. "The language of the recommendation disavows what it means to recommend."

This could have been a description of The Authoritarian Personality itself. The only way to account for the disparity between the critical theory Adorno and Horkheimer propounded in other works and the "new social catechism" that emerged from the Studies in Prejudice is that the form of the latter undertaking predetermined its content. Investigations funded by a philanthropic foundation could hardly fail to issue in policy recommendations, in this case recommendations for an ambitious program of popular "re-education, scientifically planned on the basis of understanding scientifically arrived at." What was the point of such investigations if not to provide a "program of action"? Studies designed to enlist social science in the diagnosis and treatment of social maladies did not provide an appropriate forum in which to express reservations about social science. Such studies had to observe rigorous standards of measurement, to layout the evidence in the form of charts and tables, to remind the reader at every opportunity that the problem was fearfully complex (though by no means insoluble), and thus to justify the claim that experts alone knew how to solve it.

The purpose and design of Studies in Prejudice dictated the conclusion that prejudice, a psychological disorder rooted in the "authoritarian" personality structure, could be eradicated only by subjecting the American people to what amounted to collective psychotherapy—by treating them as inmates of an insane asylum, as Thurman Arnold would have put it. This conclusion grew directly out of Horkheimer's premise that "the sincere and systematic scientific elucidation of [anti-Semitism] can contribute directly to an amelioration of the cultural atmosphere in which hatred breeds." As examples of the power of science to correct popular superstition, Horkheimer cited the dissipation of the witchcraft craze by Cartesian rationalism and the "revolution in the relation between parents

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