and children" brought about by the work of Freud. In his introduction to The Authoritarian Personality, he compared anti-Semitism to a "social disease," which the "social scientist, like the biologist or the physician," could study in "periods of quiescence" so as to find "more effective ways to prevent or reduce the virulence of the next outbreak." In their general introduction to the five Studies in Prejudice, Horkheimer and Flowerman warned that an "aroused conscience is not enough if it does not stimulate a systematic search for an answer." So much for moral philosophy, mankind's memory and conscience! Neither conscience nor the common sense of the community, it appeared, would lead to the "eradication" of prejudice. Indeed the "progress of science" could "perhaps be charted by the advances that scientists have made over commonsense notions of phenomena."

Research for The Authoritarian Personality, conducted for the most part in the closing months of the war, proceeded in two stages. Questionnaires designed to elicit prejudiced, "pseudodemocratic," or downright "antidemocratic" attitudes were submitted to a variety of subjects. Of the two thousand individuals who completed these questionnaires, a hundred and fifty were selected for what was rather grandly referred to as "intensive clinical study"—that is, for a two- or three-hour interview. Those selected for interviews had scored either very high or very low on a variety of questionnaires, and the interviews were intended "to determine the factors which most clearly distinguished one extreme from the other." Eighty subjects submitted to a thematic apperception test. The subjects included students at the University of California and other colleges, students at the Alameda School for Merchant Marine officers, inmates at San Quentin, patients at a psychiatric clinic, members of men's service organizations like the Lions and Rotary clubs, a group of professional women, and members of various other groups.

The study made no claim to rest on a representative cross-section of the population. It aimed to discover not "what per cent of the general population would agree that 'labor unions have grown too powerful' and 'that there are too many Jews in government agencies' [but] whether or not there was a general relationship between these two opinions." A pattern of contradictory answers—for example, ones that simultaneously described Jews as seclusive and intrusive, capitalists and revolutionaries— was held to be especially significant, since internal contradictions re

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