critics revealed a deeper level of agreement among Marxists, liberals, and even many American conservatives. This agreement took shape in the political climate generated by the profound shock of National Socialism, growing disenchantment with the transformative potential of working‐ class movements in the West, and a growing belief in scientific humanism—more specifically in psychotherapeutic insights and practice—as the best defense against authoritarianism. Attentive readers of The Authoritarian Personality, undistracted by occasional expressions of left-wing political orthodoxy, would have been more impressed by its unflattering view of the working class. Adorno and his colleagues found no support in their research for the proposition that the working class could be regarded as the "main carrier of liberal ideas." They qualified this statement with the conventional reminder that "the crucial role in the struggle against increasing concentration of economic power will have to be played by the working people, acting in accordance with their self-interest" ; but it was "foolhardy," they thought, "to underestimate the susceptibility to fascist propaganda within these masses." True, working-class respondents scored low on the ethnocentrism scale (and presumably on the conservatism scale as well); but their high scores on the F scale showed that although liberal unions had indoctrinated their members in ideologies opposed to overt racial discrimination, "this indoctrination did not go so far as to modify those attitudes centering around authoritarianism, which are more pronounced in this group than in most others."

It is when we turn to the question of how these "attitudes centering around authoritarianism" were actually identified that we can best grasp the way in which The Authoritarian Personality, by defining prejudice as a "social disease," substituted a medical for a political idiom and relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic—to "scientific" study as opposed to philosophical and political debate. This procedure had the effect of making it unnecessary to discuss moral and political questions on their merits. Thus "resistance to social change," "traditionalism," and the absence of the ability or disposition "actively to criticize existing authority" became pathological by definition. The tendency to see political issues "in moral rather than sociological terms" fell under the same suspicion. A perception of the world as a jungle, a belief in strict sex roles, a "rigid" sexual morality, a "punitive" and "moralistic" style of child rearing, and a "rigid adherence to existing cultural norms" identified the

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