sex." Individuals who fit this description, according to Adorno and his colleagues, suffered from repressed hostility to authority, which led them to attribute their own forbidden impulses to outsiders and to demand that these outsiders be severely punished. "In other words the individual's own unacceptable impulses are projected onto other individuals and groups who are then rejected."

The most obvious objection to all this is that the investigators had arrived at most of their conclusions in advance. Instead of supporting those conclusions, the research consisted of a set of self-validating procedures that could lead only to the expected results. Curiously enough, this objection did not figure very prominently in the voluminous commentary on The Authoritarian Personality. A more common objection—one the authors anticipated and answered—was that the study substituted a psychological for a sociological analysis of prejudice. This criticism misconstrued the nature of the work. The authors concentrated on the analysis of personality only because they took the sociological background for granted. They never doubted the importance of social inequalities in the generation of right-wing movements, but they wanted to examine the "reverberations of social patterns within the most intimate realms of individual life," as Else Frenkel-Brunswick put it. None of the contributors, she said, regarded "psychological factors as the major or exclusive determinants of political or social movements." In their introduction, they acknowledged that "broad changes in social conditions and institutions" would have a "direct bearing upon the kinds of personalities that develop within a society." Horkheimer and Flowerman, in their general introduction to Studies in Prejudice, noted that the "cause of irrational hostility is in the last analysis to be found in social frustration and injustice."

An almost equally misconceived line of criticism linked The Authoritarian Personality to the antifamilial ideologies of the extreme left. According to Brigitte and Peter Berger, the book advanced the thesis argued "even more strongly" by Wilhelm Reich, R. D. Laing, and David Cooper, that "authoritarianism has its roots in the type of family produced by bour

-450-