right opinions and also to hold them deeply and spontaneously. They had to show a professorial capacity for "critical analysis." It was not enough to have liberal ideas; one had to have a liberal personality. In a country officially committed to a democratic ideology but not yet fully emancipated from its provincial beginnings, as they saw it, the authors of The Autboritarian Personality thought it important to distinguish between "surface ideology and real opinion," between automatic adherence to democratic principles and deep-seated psychological commitment to a democratic way of life.

For this reason, they devoted a great deal of attention to the difference between the "genuine liberal" and the "pseudo-progressive," who repeated liberal slogans derived from "continuous newspaper reading" instead of arriving at the right opinions independently. Especially in the chapters contributed by Adorno, the test of spontaneous liberalism, in spite of the claim that liberal attitudes reflected an underlying psychological predisposition, became blatantly political. The pseudo-progressive gave lip-service support to the socialist "experiment" in the Soviet Union but replaced the "traditional socialist concept of class struggle with the image of a kind of joint, unanimous venture—as if society as a whole, as it is today, were ready to try socialism regardless of the influence of existing property relations." The pseudo-progressive clung to individualism and other "traditional values of American democratism" without understanding that "in an era in which 'rugged individualism' actually has resulted in far-reaching social control, ... an uncritical individualistic concept of liberty may simply serve to play into the hands of the most powerful groups." Pseudo-progressives advocated "education" as a substitute for social change; this "education complex" enabled the "antiutopian" to oppose change and "yet appear progressive." At one point, Adorno spoke of a "taxation complex," an equally exotic ailment. He found that pseudo-progressives held liberal opinions on a variety of topics but were "so deeply imbued with traditional economic concepts" that they could not follow their opinions to their proper conclusion. These subjects denounced monopoly without understanding just how pervasive it really was. "One cannot escape the impression that monopolism is used as a vague negative formula [by pseudo-progressives] but that very few subjects are actually aware of the impact of monopolization on their lives." The test of "genuine liberalism" had become so rigorous that only

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