I’m coming up to the part of the research in auth personality where freud is unavoidable

Hey sorry for bothering you, but I cannot find it in the tags. I believe some time ago you were reading a book about facist personality? Do you recommend it? And do you know were we might find it?

Not bothering at all! The book is called The Authoritarian Personality, and this is the tag I used for liveblogging/discussing it (I’m on mobile so if the link doesn’t work, it’s just “#the authoritarian personality” tag on my blog).

My short answer is yes I would recommend it. It’s given me a much more robust way to approach fascism as a political project, and it echoes a lot of other profiles of fascism that I find useful.

The big caveats I would offer about the book are:

This was written in the 1940s in the United States, and 3 of the 4 authors are psychologists. The back half of the book has large sections that are dedicated to psychoanalysis of “high scoring” (ie, those who scored as very susceptible to fascism according to the surveys the researchers created) and “low scoring” participants. I skimmed or skipped these sections entirely. I don’t want to say not to read them, but you should do so with a high degree of skepticism. The psychologists employ Freudian psychoanalysis quite a bit and I have very little respect for that approach to fascism (or anything for that matter, but I think it’s an especially poor analytical tool for understanding ideology).

This book’s description of fascism is that it is an intellectual product of capitalism, but there is very limited discussion of white supremacy or settler colonialism - two historical processes (I use the word historical not to imply these things exist only in the past, but that they were developed alongside other political and social forces over a period of many centuries) that are integral to understanding capitalism. I think the book is very good at diagnosing how antisemitism is integral to fascism (and the point of the research is to investigate antisemitism as the primary or original bigotry of fascism, a position I generally agree with), but it has limited utility for talking about how fascism is an imperial/colonial project that cannot be decoupled from white supremacy. This book should be used to better understand antisemitism, but you should seek out other discussions of fascism that attend to its colonial and white supremacist histories (Aimé Césaire’s essay Discourse on Colonialism is a great starting point for this).

Adorno (the one sociologist who authored this book) is a great writer but his writing can be kind of dense sometimes, and his chapters tend to be in conversation with his other work on mass culture, but he doesn’t explicitly state that in this book, so if you see him going on a two-page tangent about industrial cultural standardisation and are like wtf are you talking about, that’s what he’s doing. I actually like those tangents and think they add valuable insight into how fascism functions in capitalistic societies, but they can be kind of inscrutable sometimes if you aren’t familiar with his other work. Also in general don’t feel bad if you aren’t getting everything he’s saying, his writing can be dense and jargon-y sometimes, which I know not everyone is a fan of.

This book’s focus is on fascism as it is expressed through the personality structure (which is a complicated framework for thinking about individuality that I have conflicted feelings on, but they use “personality” as a coherent object that can be analysed, a thing that exists in all people), so this research doesn’t directly deal with the economic and social forces that inform fascism. It definitely does discuss those things (primarily in Adorno’s chapters), but it doesn’t do it comprehensively. They will mention race as a factor in fascist belief, but they won’t really discuss like, systemic racism in society. The same is true for gender. They talk about class more, but again not systematically. I say this so that you don’t go in expecting them to tackle the economic/societal elements of fascism in a comprehensive way.

I have the 2019 edition of the book, which has a forward by Peter Gordon (not familiar with his work) that I generally liked. It also has a chapter dedicated to Adorno’s reflection on the research as a whole after it was initially published that I really enjoyed. This edition is just shy of 1000 pages long. It’s a thick ass book and it took me about a year to finish.

I got it off the publisher’s website (Verso I think it was?) when they were having a sale. It’s pricy (~$50 CAD), so if you don’t want to invest in that you should be able to borrow it from a library. It may also be on libgen or zlibrary online.

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.