geois-capitalist society." It was only "one small step," the Bergers thought, from The Authoritarian Personality to the wholesale condemnation of the family and to the "type of thinking" typified by the "commune movement in America and Western Europe." Whereas the first line of criticism overlooked the Marxist elements that went into the study, the Bergers' reading made too much of them. The general conclusions reached by Adorno and his collaborators fitted comfortably into a liberal consensus that condemned the allegedly repressive family patterns typical of working-class and lower-middle-class milieux and advocated as an alternative not "communes" but the enlightened family patterns already adopted by the professional and managerial classes. It was because The Authoritarian Personality appeared to support the prevailing liberal attitudes that it was absorbed so quickly into the mainstream of American social science. Its real importance lay in its contribution to the redefinition of liberalism as a cultural as well as a political impulse. It helped to move public discourse from the political to the psychosocial realm and to substitute medical and therapeutic categories for ethical and philosophical ones.

A third line of criticism rested, like the Bergers', on an overestimation of the importance of Adorno's Marxism. Edward Shils, in an analysis widely regarded as definitive, accused Adorno of confining his attention to right-wing authoritarianism and ignoring authoritarianism on the left. Adorno invited this type of criticism with obiter dicta that made his political opinions unmistakable, as when he denounced the "complete irrationality, not to say idiocy," of the "spurious identification of communism and fascism." Such outbursts enabled Shils to accuse him of treating left and right as opposite poles of the political spectrum and of ignoring the convergence of political extremes in a common antipathy to democratic values. But Shils had no objection to the translation of political categories into psychiatric categories. He did not quarrel with the psychoanalytic reductionism according to which a repressed revolt against parental authority leads to the displacement of aggressive impulses against outsiders. Indeed he regarded this explanation of the psychodynamics of authoritarianism as "one of the Berkeley group's most valuable hypotheses." He objected not to their psychologizing but merely to their politics.

The disagreement between Adorno and the most influential among his

-451-