a civilized minority could pass it—a minority of one, if Adorno was taken as the final arbiter.

The Authoritarian Personality was only one of many postwar studies to argue, at least implicitly, that the people as a whole had little understanding of liberal democracy and that important questions of public policy should be decided by educated elites, not submitted to a popular vote. A widely cited study by Samuel Stouffer, Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties (1955), found elites to be far more tolerant of political nonconformity than the general public. Edward Shils reached the same conclusion in The Torment of Secrecy (1956), which claimed that "both the love of public liberty and the preference for the common good dominate the action of only a minority." In The Politics of Mass Society (1959), William Kornhauser argued that the working class and the lower middle class were "less committed to democratic parties and civil liberties" than the educated classes.

Postwar students of foreign policy, notably Walter Lippmann and George F. Kennan, blamed the democratization of diplomacy under Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt for the intrusion of moral and ideological passions into policy-making. Their plea for a diplomacy conducted by trained professionals and based on the realistic calculation of national advantage reflected a belief, born of the long struggle against isolationism in the thirties and early forties, that foreign policy had to be removed from the arena of partisan debate and entrusted to a bipartisan administrative apparatus that would not cave in to political pressures. It was a "disconcerting" fact of recent history, Lippmann thought, that the "enfranchised masses have not, surprisingly enough, been those who have most staunchly defended the institutions of freedom." The confrontation with totalitarianism—first with Nazi Germany and then with Soviet Russia—had exposed grave weaknesses in democracy: inertia, indecisiveness, a preference for quick and painless solutions, a readiness to avoid difficult decisions by submitting them to public opinion. A "Jacobin conception of the emancipated and sovereign people" had brought

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