To
the references
Personality, Authority, Society
Remarks on the Analysis of Authoritarianism
and Prejudice in the Social Sciences
Michael Werz
When Max Horkheimer delivered his welcome address to the newly
matriculated students at Frankfurt University in 1952, he
remarked that although the country's cities lay in ruins, the
social conditions that had originally made Auschwitz possible
remained in effect. Against this development, the Rector
maintained, there was "no antidote except understanding".
He warned the young students against the "narrow-mindedness
of specialization" and urged them to remain faithful to the
"critical spirit and reflection on the whole". (Horkheimer
1985, p. 381f.) Such exhortations had not been heard at the
institution in years. Only with the return of the most important
members of the former Institute for Social Research, which
had been plundered and then dissolved by the National Socialists,
was critical social theory of the Frankfurt variety able to
reestablish itself in Germany. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.
Adorno, long reluctant to leave their North American exile, had
finally decided to return. At precisely those universities that
had been National Socialist strongholds, they attempted to
combine advanced methods of American social research with
European philosophical-historical critique they had practiced so
successfully in the United States. The trip had been postponed
time and again as a result of political considerations;
nonetheless, Horkheimer at last decided to take the gamble that
led to the renewal of a unique tradition of social-philosophical
research and education. To the reproach and claims that a Jewish
Diaspora had no place in Germany he was in the habit of
responding - as is evidenced by a recently published collection
of his late letters - that if everything in Germany was already
so bad, he certainly did not want to exacerbate to this state of
affairs by staying away.
The analysis of anti-Semitism already constituted a
methodological key to Frankfurt-School critical social theory in
the period prior to the Second World War. In empirical studies
carried out by scholars from various disciplines, philosophical
concepts were supposed to prove their worth. The most extensive
and ambitious of these investigations remains the series Studies
in Prejudice.1
Researched and written in the United States in the late forties,
this collection can be viewed as supporting evidence for the
philosophical reflections presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment
five years earlier. In a 1944 letter to Horkheimer, Adorno
outlined the urgency of the task at hand: "to get on the
track" of the new social rationality that found expression
in National Socialism, "to uncover its irrational character",
because, according to Adorno, "the theory of contemporary
anti-Semitism also depends to a large extent on its
interpretation". (Adorno 1944) An intensive theoretical
investigation into the problem of authoritarian cognitive
structures had already taken place in the thirties, as part of
the Institute's Studies on Authority and Family. In the early
forties, reports of the extermination of European Jews appeared
with increasing frequency, and the exiled members of the
Institute decided to retrace the steps that had led to barbarism.
In an initial proposal for the newly devised «Anti-Semitism
Project», Adorno made it clear that the aims of this research
program far exceeded those of quantitative empirical social
research: "It appears that in our epoch humans are
undergoing transformations much more profound than can be
explained by psychology. It is as if the very substance of
humanity has been transformed along with the foundations of
society. ... Today, religious emancipation of the middle classes,
with all of its manifestations of "progressiveness",
has itself been revealed as a dehumanizing force." (Adorno,
"Begründungsentwurf")
In light of the new societal conditions, theoretical work
grounded in an orthodox notion of false consciousness had become
unproductive, because a traditional enlightenment-based ideology
critique was unable to keep pace with the totalization of
ideology. Therefore, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, it could
not be a question of interpreting false consciousness as a "basic
attribute of mankind", since such an understanding would
"legitimize, so to speak, delusion as natural law."
Critical theory takes as its starting point precisely this
structural weakness in the traditional critique of prejudice,
insisting on a shift in the function of ideology as well as its
critique in the face of developed capitalist conditions of
production - but without the abandonment of enlightenment
traditions. This step becomes necessary because the "essence
of ideology itself" is recognized as bourgeois, as "objectively
necessary and at the same time false consciousness, as the
interpenetration of the true and the untrue" (Adorno 1968, p.
163; 168), and as an affirmation of the status quo.
Initially, this insight complicates the theoretical project,
since critique of ideology, understood "as the confrontation
of ideology with its own truth, is only possible insofar as the
former contains a rational element on which critique can expend
its energy." The task of the critique of authoritarian
attitudes and of the religion of everyday life2 can no longer be a
simple refutation of those ideologies. Rather, in the face of the
predominant cultural-industrial forms, it is "more
advisable," according to Horkheimer and Adorno, "to
analyze upon which dispositions in individuals they place their
bets, what they endeavor to arouse in these individuals, and that
is infinitely different from the official rhetoric".
Because, following the crisis in bourgeois society, the
traditional concept of ideology appears to lose its object, the
investigation must now turn toward the 'faithless faith' of the
individual in pure existence, a hermetic 'second nature' - this
is the project of Studies in Prejudice.
The social-psychological orientation of the investigations
required the further development of categories from
psychoanalysis, whose ancillary position within a materialist
theory of society had earlier been outlined in the institutes
journal - the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung - by Erich
Fromm. Fromm, who developed his arguments in debates of Freud's
works carried out with his institute colleagues. He argued that
social-psychological phenomena should be understood as "processes
of active and passive adaptation of the drive-apparatus to the
socio-economic situation. ... Social psychology must explain the
shared - socially relevant - psychic attitudes and ideologies -
and in particular their unconscious roots - by examining the
influence of economic conditions on libidinal urges. (Fromm 1932,
p. 39-40) This specific methodological orientation guides the
subsequent analyses of authority and prejudice by the members of
the institute. The Frankfurt authors take as their starting point
the notion that the emotional bonds of individuals are subject to
the same shifts as general social relations and that their
function is transformed as well with the changing libidinal
structures of society. "They stop functioning as putty and
become plastique," wrote the prescient Fromm in the
aforementioned contribution from 1932. Initially the
investigations addressed the genesis of modern anti-Semitism
and the traces that this modernization had left behind in the
human psyche. A simple identification of traditional Jew-hatred
with modern anti-Semitism was unthinkable, because the latter was
viewed as a general metaphor - one that had to be conceptually
decoded - for prejudice and authoritarian consciousness. In
opposition to then fashionable explanations of ethnic or
religious prejudice based on 'centuries old' antipathy,
especially as propounded by the positivist sociology of religion,
Adorno rightly pointed out "that it is impossible to
construct an immediate connection between the religious anathema
pronounced against Jews and today's administrative planning of
the liquidation of 'inferior races'". (Adorno, "Remarks")
The five Studies in Prejudiceemerged out of an ambitious
interdisciplinary program that began in 1944. After having read
through the texts, Adorno insisted that it be clear to the reader
what an anti-Semite was. Following the materialist traditions of
the psychologically informed theories of prejudice found in
Bacon, Locke and Helvétius, the authors undertook an historical
review of the phenomena of prejudice and marginalization, anti-Semitic
ideology and mass extermination. The goal of this undertaking is
twofold: on the one hand, to reconstruct the forms taken by these
phenomena under specific socio-historical conditions; on the
other hand, to find appropriate demarcations for general trends
of individuation, domination and the formation of consciousness.
The results are not only valid for the late forties, the period
in which the works were written; they point to a structural
moment of societal development. As late as 1970, twenty years
after completion of the studies, Herbert Marcuse argued for their
continued relevance. In the preface to the second American
edition of Prophets of Deceit, he writes: "continued
progress on the road to more prosperity, more comfort, and more
aggression seems to go hand in hand with the progress of this
malaise - a persistence which testifies to the actuality of this
study" (Marcuse 1970, p. v). Following this approach, the
central issue for the authors becomes the extent to which the
structure of prejudiced appropriations of reality are subject to
historical shifts, as well as the mechanisms by which anti-Semitic
marginalization is barbarized to the point of mass extermination.
Approaching the problem from a variety of theoretical and
methodological perspectives, the Studies in Prejudice
present several explanatory frameworks.
Unfortunately, none of these have received adequate attention in
either the United States or Germany. Yet precisely in light of
contemporary debates over the fate of affirmative action in the
United States or the self-understanding of Western European
immigration societies - which has been seriously put to the test
in the framework of European unification - a reexamination of
these critical studies is important, because they fall victim to
neither particularistic idealizations nor monolithic dogmatism.
Taken together, the Studies in Prejudice represent a
materialist, interdisciplinary research program, in which
empirical investigations are productively combined with ethically
committed intellectual history and ideology critique. Perhaps the
most compelling evidence for the aforementioned central thesis of
the project - that modern anti-Semitism and traditional Jew-hatred
relate to one another only through a series of complex mediations
- can be found in Paul W. Massing's contribution to the project, Rehearsal
for Destruction. In this study Massing describes the
modernization of anti-Semitism and the corresponding structures
of prejudice in the German Reich after 1871. Rehearsal for
Destruction provides exemplary illustrations of this dynamic
against a backdrop of political and economic transformation,
pointing to the qualitatively new (abstract) conditions in the
modern, commodity-producing societies of Europe. In the period
prior to the turn of the century attacks on Jews in the German
Reich still constitute a means to political ends. Political
conservatives, monarchists and the nobility consciously make use
of such attacks in order to combat the liberal ('Jewish') press
and weaken revolutionary positions in the years leading up to the
1890s, as well as to impede general political reforms. (Cf.
Massing 1949) With the emergence of a völkisch anti-Semitism,
however, the political frame of reference for anti-Semitic
agitation shifts toward an anti-state and anti-parliamentary
position, which receives ideological support from nationalistic
and 'Western' ideals. Henceforth the 'Jewish Question' is styled
as a national problem, leading to demands for the revocation of
the emancipation laws as an essential prerequisite for 'German
redemption'. The qualitative difference here rests above all in
the attempt to draw a formal distinction between Germans and Jews
converted, with the help of racist legislation, Jews into
foreigners. At this point, these reactionary classificatory
strategies are still accompanied by the ethnic ideals of
conservative Protestantism.3 Trusting in the
stability of the Christian world, this Protestantism continues to
base its discrimination against Jews on their alleged nihilistic
spirit rather than on biological or 'racially determined'
differences. Only in the last years of the nineteenth century
does radicalized völkisch anti-Semitism break with the
stabilizing, conservative and religious tradition of the anti-Semites.
The anti-statist turn against the 'ruling classes' leads to
increasingly distorted perceptions of society.
The biologisation of religious revelation and a social-Darwinist
hierarchisation of human races provide the superficial
legitimation for the claims of one 'racial' community to rule
over others, turning the oppression of the Jewish 'other' into a
dictate of nature. The metaphors of 'Jewish subversion',
perceived as quasi-biological and independent of historical
constellations should also be understood within this discursive
and ideological context. 'Aryan blood' becomes hypostatized as
the guarantee of survival in a threatening social environment and
is simultaneously coupled with the putative destiny of world
domination. Anti-Semitic pogrom or the fall of the nation - this
is the choice that emerges from an intensification of social
competition in a system whose history has been replaced by the
mythical dream of a society of non-competitive solidarity that is
at the same time powerfully expansive, and whose members still
believe they can establish the modern state on the basis of
secure, small-scale private property. Massings investigation
pinpoints an historical rupture, when national ideologies no
longer suffice as the foundation and the unifying frame of
reference for a modern polity, and the metaphysical vacuum
historically created by secularization has to be ideologically
filled. It is at precisely this moment that structures of
prejudice assume a mediating function within the societal dynamic.
With the subsumtion of the social under the logic of domination,
elements of subjectivity are forced to submit to the imperatives
of instrumental reason and social organization. With regard to
the United States, Horkheimer described the effects of such a
dynamic by pointing out that they lead to a state of affairs in
which the "united executive administration of industrial
forces tends to dominate all of economic life: production,
distribution and also ideology. ... With the abolition of the
sphere of distribution, another category tends to disappear, that
of the individual". (Horkheimer 1946, p. 8.)
Consequently, the three social-ological analyses (Authoritarian
Personality, Dynamics of Prejudice and Anti-ism and Emotional
Disorder) investigate the transformation of personality
structures in mass society. Although the absence of a
standardized terminology leads to occasional inconsistencies
between the texts, the convergence of the various authors'
conceptual interpretations nonetheless points to a shared
methodological foundation. It derives from the assumption of dynamically
constituted structures of character and prejudice that impact
the different layers of consciousness and perception as well as
the structure of individuals' needs. To this extent, clearly
delineated, static conceptions for the Studies in Prejudice
would be inadequate in any case, since they lack the flexibility
necessary to grasp these complex and dynamic processes. By the
same token, the term 'anti-Semitism' itself functions as a
metaphor, designating a range of intolerant behavior toward a (more
or less arbitrarily) chosen minority that must first be
constituted as a threat in the consciousness of the prejudiced
individual. Such an ambitious program cannot be realized solely
on the basis of individual social-psychological studies, because
anti-Semitism is not a "purely 'psychological problem'".
Rather, a social criticism that takes anti-Semitic phenomena as
its starting point must focus on those places "where social
and psychological causation merge," because "the fate
of the world is determined, to a great extent, by the operation
of economic laws beyond the control of man, rather than by the
'nature' of man, whatever that term may connote." (Horkheimer
1946, p. 9)
Faithful to this prescription, the authors of Dynamics of
Prejudice, Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, concentrate
on the mechanisms through which the individual evaluates and
processes social experience. (e.g. Bettelheim and Janowitz 1950,
p. 104) In focusing on these mechanisms, they analyze one
important aspect of subjective appropriation of reality. Their
investigation does not, however, reflect back on the actual
social occurrences that the interview subjects had interpreted
and categorized according to their own specific reservoir of
experience. It remains instead at the level of an immanent ego-analysis
of individuals, without inquiring into the societal basis of this
analysis. Nathan W. Ackerman and Marie Jahoda make use of similar
metaphors in their psychoanalytic study, Anti-Semitism and
Emotional Disorder. (Ackerman and Jahoda 1950, p. vii) Such a
straightforward application of individual clinical results to
existing general conditions may, in the short term, help combat
anti-Semitism and further the project of enlightenment.
Particularly in the years immediately following the war, this
approach was not without a certain moral legitimacy. On a
theoretical level, however, this limited horizon belies the
complex process through which critical theory itself was
constituted. Horkheimer and Adorno were well aware that a
psychologistic labeling of the "pathologies" of
modernity was inadequate. Rather, in keeping with the self-reflective
intent of critical social philosophy, the object of criticism
must - in the sense of a performative consummation of theory -
was supposed to programmatically explicate itself. This is
because the simultaneously immanent and systematic intent of
critical social theory stands in opposition to change understood
solely as an immanent reform of existing conditions. The
transformation of conditions must be possible at any moment,
because theory is, as the philosopher Helmut Reinicke remarks,
"in permanent rebellion against its own positivity. As long
as it aspires to practical relevance, it must transcend itself."
(Reinicke 1988, p. 225)
Taken as a whole, however, the Studies in Prejudice do not
fall short of this goal. They address particular aspects of
individuation and social history, remaining conscious of the
possibility that "a relentless study of the instinctual
dynamics of the personality" might "reveal that the
very same social forces make for the disintegration of individual
identity and for the degeneration of civilization" (Horkheimer
1946, p. 10). Adorno as well, in his remarks on The
Authoritarian Personality, offers an extensive reflection on
this methodological and theoretical problem. Here he argues that
"the ultimate source of prejudice has to be sought in social
factors which are incomparably stronger than the 'psyche' of any
one individual involved. ... Our detailed analysis of subjective
patterns does not mean that, in our opinion, prejudice can be
explained in such terms. On the contrary, we regard the analysis
of objective social forces which engender prejudice as the most
pressing issue in contemporary research into anti-minority bias".
(Adorno, "Remarks")
Arising from these considerations, the individual studies provide
theoretically and empirically rich interpretive models for
addressing a more general question - one that follows from the
tradition of Enlightenment critiques of prejudice - namely, what
is the relationship between unsuccessful secularization and
emancipation? The Dynamics of Prejudice, to give just one
example, refers to the relationship between intolerance and
"indifference to religion" (Bettelheim and Janowitz
1950, p. 52) and interprets the disintegration of a binding moral
codex as conducive to anti-Semitic modes of thought. This
observation finds confirmation on a political-historical level in
Massing's work. Massing, it will be recalled, discussed the
radicalization of völkisch anti-Semitism that occurred as the
mitigating influence of conservative and religious traditions
became increasingly irrelevant.4 A further important
insight of Bettelheim's and Janowitz' aforementioned analysis
derives from its utilization of a dynamic concept of prejudice,
which allows the authors to point out the way in which social
transformations often overtax the individual's ability to adapt
to new societal demands. As a result of this situation, "rapid
mobility either upward or downward is positively related to inter-ethnic
hostility". (Bettelheim and Janowitz 1950, p. 61) This
dynamic factor is of particular significance for two reasons.
First, reflections on the sources of prejudice and anti-Semitism
must never posit a direct, discrete link to the economic
exploitation of the individual, but must always consider the
highly mediated relationship between these phenomena. Second, the
unrealizable demands for adaptation placed on the individual pave
the way for the flawed notion that one is exclusively a victim of
prevailing conditions, a notion that, in authoritarian
personalities, is accompanied by a belief in the immutability of
these conditions. Societal institutions are to a large extent
perceived as so far removed from individual interests and as so
overwhelming, that it seems "impossible 'for one person to
try to change it'". (Bettelheim and Janowitz 1950, p. 67)
This preconditioned loss of the individual's ability to conceive
of himself as part of a social community with the confidence and
strength to challenge existing conditions reinforces the status
quo and makes an identification with the institutionalized forms
of domination all the more necessary. In accordance with this
logic, state power not only guarantees the protection of
individuals, as Hobbes argued; it also becomes the object of an
identity-preserving cathexis. In The Dynamics of Prejudice,
the authors point out that openly totalitarian forms can quickly
supplant existing parliamentary ones when - as was the case in
the Weimar Republic - identification with the system of
government no longer prevails.
With the help of a dynamic concept of prejudice, it is possible
to show - and this is the central thesis of the investigation -
that relative ego strength "is considerably more important
in conditioning attitudes of tolerance than the social and
economic factor of competition." (Bettelheim and Janowitz
1950, p. 85; 151) Interestingly, these results accord with
Freud's observations of compulsive acts and the practice of
religious rituals. He traces both of these phenomena back to the
"repression of an activated drive", which leads to an
"expectant fear of the future" that can only be
processed neurotically or religiously. (Freud 1973, p. 15) Thus
additional supporting evidence is provided for the hypothesis
that societies organized largely according to the principle of
competition by no means generate prejudiced patterns for
individual perception of reality directly, but only through a
series of mediations. These patterns appear to be transmitted not
merely through competitive conditions that can be experienced
immediately, but primarily through the individual's view of
social reality and his corresponding perception of self as victim.
The challenge arising from a precise determination of the
relative strength of social and subjective elements lies in
identifying potentially emancipatory tendencies within this field
of tension, and, above all, in ascertaining the extent to which
autonomous subjectivity can even constitute itself under the
conditions of capitalist production and the culture industry.
Bettelheim and Janowitz formulate their response cautiously and
in general terms, claiming that although it is incorrect to
assert "that ethnic intolerance is a consequence of the
capitalist system, ethnic intolerance occurring within a
capitalist society will nevertheless be deeply influenced by the
character of that society." (Bettelheim and Janowitz 1950, p.
163) The limitations of an immanent approach also constrain the
study Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder, in which
Ackerman and Jahoda rely exclusively upon the problematic concept
of "irrational anti-Semitism". (Ackerman and Jahoda
1950, p. 6) Such a notion fails to capture those elements of
instrumental reason that have clearly been incorporated into anti-Semitic
consciousness.5 In
contrast, Adorno's study provides a more precise interpretation
of the shift from prejudiced perception of reality to
irrationally destructive frenzy. He incorporates into his
analysis the corresponding interests of the ruling class,
pointing out that "the decisive objective aspect of present-day
anti-Semitism is the fact that it cannot possibly be attributed
to spontaneous impulses of the population. It is a carefully
pondered, rationalistically concocted doctrine, promoted from
above, that utilizes powerful socio-psychological dispositions in
the masses. The difference between modern anti-Semitism and
anonymous historical trends is precisely this rationality in the
irrational". (Adorno, "Remarks")
The strength of Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder lies
in its analysis of the stigmatization of 'foreignness' and the
socialization process by which this stigmatization enters
individual consciousness. (Ackerman and Jahoda 1950, p. 44) Even
in the early phase of their development, the family conditions
children to rationalize "the absence of affectionate human
relations and the existence of hostility as difference in group
membership".6
The projection of hostility onto the 'alien' Jews in the process
of failed individuation can therefore be seen as the expression
of radically egocentric individuals lacking sufficient self-confidence.
As the authors write, "the parasitic self of these patients
induces them to live as though their immediate surroundings were
part of their selves or they a part of their surroundings."
(Ackerman and Jahoda 1950, p. 76) To be sure, the inner-psychic
analysis, despite its strengths, tends to eclipse the social
determinants of prejudiced behavior; nonetheless, the social-psychological
studies do provide a differentiated diagnosis of damaged
subjectivity in bourgeois societies.7
Adorno takes a different tack in The Authoritarian Personality,
placing his confidence in the possibility of a democratic and
ultimately more rational ego structure, toward which progress can
and must be made. This strikes him as particularly important
since, as he argues, "the rational system of an objective
and thoughtful man is not a thing apart from his personality".
(Adorno et. al. 1950, p. 10) Unfortunately, he fails to further
develop these positions. Whether such an abstract, preliminary
formulation can do justice to the demands of a "materialistically
grounded theory of subjectivity" and needs (Schmidt 1988, p.
264) must remain unresolved.
A primary source of difficulty for the construction of a theory
that proceeds from ideology critique lies in the previously
mentioned dynamism of the anti-Semitic perception of reality. As
Adorno writes, it is a "structural element of anti-Semitic
persecution that it starts with limited objectives, but goes on
without being stopped." (Adorno et. al. 1950, p. 624)
Against this tendency toward a generalization of individual
prejudice into socially dominant patterns of behavior or
interpretation, critical social theory must insist on the
possibility of difference.8 The homogenizing
force of anti-Semitism can only be contained through a
subjectivity aware of the impossibility of perfect identity,
in the hope that humans as subjects represent "the limit of
reification" and that the stereotyped thinking of anti-Semitic
ideology must each time seize them compulsively. As Adorno had
already noted some years earlier, "the hopeless effort of
repetition offers the only sliver of hope that the repetition
will not be in vain, that man cannot be subjugated after all".
(Adorno 1981, p. 331) He takes up this thought again in The
Authoritarian Personality when he discusses the
stigmatization of "less prejudiced" individuals as
"eccentric". This label refers to that which "is
'different-, to what is branded as slightly abnormal by standards
of conformity, but which expresses individualization, the
development of human traits which have not been pre-formed, as it
were, by the social machinery of contemporary civilization".
In alienated mass society, it is precisely this -strangeness-
that reveals a moment of non-identity and stability, where
stereotypical conformity is transcended and the conditions for
the possibility of autonomy emerge. But the idea of an "absolute
individual per se, completely identical with itself and with
nothing else, is an empty abstraction" (Adorno et. al. 1950,
p. 651) constructed by prejudiced consciousness. In the inner-psychic
attempt to cope with concrete conflicts and needs, this
abstraction increasingly takes on the quality of a quasi-religious
conception. As sociologist Detlev Claussen remarks, "identity
as a demand of anti-theoretical needs can only be the result of
psychic action that denies material reality. Identity ... is
achieved only in the grave."9
The inescapable need for an identity-stabilizing position in the
face of inscrutable social conditions results in class- or group-identification,
which, according to Adorno, must of course be understood as a
"psychological variable" that can become quite self-sufficient
and dynamic, detaching itself from the concrete social
experiences of the individual when history gives rise to a new
social environment. So too do the economic foundations of modern
societies often transform themselves more quickly than the
corresponding ideological forms. In his contribution to The
Authoritarian Personality, Daniel J. Levinson describes a
common "'traditional conservative' ideology on the part of
the participants in the study, despite the fact that "the
actual politico-economic situation has changed considerably from
the one, fifty or more years ago, to which the ideology refers."
Those scholars contributing to the study see in the increasing
diversification a "general trend of Western civilization",
one with corresponding implications for the subject formation of
individuals. Contradictory societal trends lead to the
constitution of ambivalent personalities. These are characterized
on the one hand by the fear of failure and defeat in competition
with others, but also by an "identification with the
underdog" based on inherited, though currently obsolete
patterns for interpreting reality. (Adorno et. al. 1950, p. 172;
177; 484) Adorno spoke elsewhere in similar terms, when he made
his well-known remark on the "sociological miracle" of
National Socialism that allowed adherents to feel as though they
belonged simultaneously to the elites and the masses.
A problem arises from these insights for the investigations in
question here, indicated by Max Horkheimer in his remark that
"a mere appeal to the conscious mind does not suffice,
because anti-Semitism and the susceptibility to anti-Semitic
propaganda spring from the unconscious." (Horkheimer 1946, p.
2) Appellative or enlightenment-based argumentative strategies
find themselves in the paradoxical position of wanting to utilize
the authority of their insights to change the perceptions of
authoritarian personality-type individuals who can only become
more flexible in their encounters with reality through a stronger
identification with pre-given, conformist patterns of thought. (Cf.
Adorno et. al. 1950, p. 486) For this reason, the studies direct
their attention to a comparison of behaviors in other social
contexts, distinguishing, for example, between prejudiced and
prejudice-free individuals as regards violence, especially
violence in connection with sexuality. While prejudice-free
individuals perceive and judge violence according to a "moral
frame of reference", prejudiced individuals commonly
associate sexuality and aggression. As the authors explain,
sexuality "is perceived as aggressive and threatening.
Aggression is aimed at the body of the victim, without reference
to personal relationships or to psychological meanings for
aggressor or victim." This approach is productive, because
an anti-sensualist reservoir of experience and reified subject
relations appear to indicate a state of consciousness
characterized by weak super-ego control and a correspondingly
high likelihood that "unsocialized impulses" will break
through the surface. By the same token, there is much evidence to
indicate that "open sensuality" is a function of a
prejudice-free personality. (Adorno et. al. 1950, pp. 566ff.; 572)
In this context, the psychoanalytic studies raise a number of
significant theoretical questions, such as the possibility of a
materialist-based "emancipatory sensuality" in a time
where individuals tend to adopt an exclusively mythical
relationship toward their own desensualized desires and needs,
one that has pre-conditioned by the various institutions of the
culture industry. Because of their narrowly defined scope,
however, the psychoanalytic studies alone can offer no
substantive answers. The beginnings of a response, however, are
discernible in the contributions made to the studies by core
members of the Institute for Social Research, for example in Leo
Löwenthal's summary passages on anti-Semitic agitation and
Adorno's reflections in The Authoritarian Personality.
The theoretical insight of the Studies in Prejudice - that only
reflection on the mechanisms of integration10 can provide the
starting point for a critical overcoming of the repressive
effects of these mechanisms - gives rise to a further question:
Is it even possible to conceive of a dialectical notion of social
conformity in which the tension-filled relationship between
critical sociability and conformist stereotyping is abolished?
The associations made by some of those interviewed when
describing an emancipation from socially imposed conventions
would seem to speak against this. Only in combination with death
can these individuals imagine true self-realization. When asked
what they would do in the last six months of their lives, they
responded, "Exactly what I please." (Adorno et. al.
1950, p. 574) The break with convention, the assertion of one's
own interests against the overwhelming power of the social, is
perceived as life-threatening.11 In this context,
simple strategies of enlightenment, not to mention well-intentioned
manipulation, only serve to strengthen these convention-bound
behaviors and attitudes. Thus Adorno criticizes at one point in
his contribution the anti-fascist strategies of unions in the
United States, which he describes as "indoctrination in anti-discrimination".
(Adorno et. al. 1950, p. 269) In the final chapter of the study,
this criticism is made more explicit in the argument the fascist
potential cannot be overcome by the "manipulation of people".
(Adorno et. al. 1950, p. 975)
Instead, if the authoritarian subjugation to the status quo is to
be overcome, an enlightenment conscious of its own limits must
carve out a space for reflection on the position of the
individual within the societal framework. This is because, as
Adorno explains, "the high-scoring [i.e. prejudiced, MW]
subjects do not seem to behave as autonomous units whose
decisions are important for their own fate as well as that of
society, but rather as submissive centers of reactions, looking
for the conventional 'thing to do', and riding what they consider
'the wave of the future'. This observation seems to fall in line
with the economic tendency toward gradual disappearance of the
free-market and the adaptation of man to the slowly emerging new
condition." (Adorno, "Remarks")
These new conditions, which define societies organized on the
basis of competition, also influence the identity-construction of
individuals. Following the breakdown of traditional religious
orientations and behavioral models, "religion does not play
such a decisive role within the frame of mind of most people as
it once did; only rarely does it seem to account for their social
attitudes and opinions". (Adorno et. al. 1950, p. 727) And
yet, although religion no longer appears to provide models for
social action or determine social behavior, this holds only on a
superficial level. Only in the exceptional case does the absence
of explicit religiosity correspond to a real emancipation from
religious structures of thought. As the authors of The
Authoritarian Personality point out, "the general trend
towards religious indifference does not constitute altogether a
break between religious persuasion and our main problem."
Thus it must be supposed "that on a deeper, more unconscious
level the religious heritage, the carry-over of old belief and
the identification with certain denominations still make
themselves felt." (Adorno et. al. 1950, p. 727; 281) In the Dialectic
of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno speak in a similar
way of anti-Semitism as "a deeply imprinted schema, a ritual
of civilization; the pogroms are true ritual murders." (Horkheimer
and Adorno 1972, p. 171)
Adorno suggests implementing these insights in an investigation
of the concept of belief, in order to pinpoint those moments in
modern civilization's process of secularization that miscarried
and, following the displacement of collective religious belief,
paved the way for authoritarian consciousness. In his
formulations one finds outlined the foundation for a theory of
the religion of everyday life: "It would be a tempting task
to analyze the change of meaning undergone by the word 'belief'.
It illustrates most clearly religious neutralization. Formerly
the idea of belief was emphatically related to the religious
dogma. Today it is applied to practically everything which a
subject feels the right to have as his own, as his 'opinion'. ...
without subjecting it to any criteria of objective truth. The
secularization of 'believing' is accompanied by arbitrariness of
that which one believes: it is molded after the preferences for
one or the other commodity and has little relation to the idea of
truth. ... This use of belief is almost an equivalent of the
hackneyed, 'I like it', which is about to lose any meaning."
(Adorno et. al. 1950, footnote p. 742)
Adorno formulates in this passage an emphatic notion of truth,
without, however, restricting the scope of his societal critique.
The theoretical difficulty of the described development lies less
in the loss of meaning of religious forms than in the fact that
religious models for interpreting social reality are no longer
subject to the principle of practicability. They function as a
kind of (previously religious) doctrine of pre-stabilized harmony
within the secularized context of a competition-based economy.
Because they have become detached from their material
foundations, stereotypes based on prejudiced thinking and
individually processed experience take on a life of their own.
While these stereotypes correspond to inner-psychic conditions,
they fail accurately to reflect external, objective reality.
Against this backdrop of a pre-structured perception, social
experiences are, so to speak, existentialised, and the moral
strength of religious convictions, previously a source of a
common reality, is supplanted by a diffuse and distorted
facsimile. The only way out of this psychic cul-de-sac is a
supposedly liberating about-face, even if this movement is no
longer linked with the idea of social transformation, but only
with the compensatory requirements of individual aggression.
These forms of the authoritarian processing of social experience
find their ideological expression in comments such as Hitler's
that "one can only die for an idea that one does not
understand". Here enlightenment runs up against its limit,
frustrated by the unifying force of the societal de-mythologization
process, which "liquidates traces of animism earlier and
more radically than it does the philosophical idea of the
Absolute". Even the critical content of a materialist
atheism proves "obsolescent in a world the objective spirit
of which is essentially areligious." The qualitative
transformations that accompany the failed liberation from
religion simultaneously shift the meaning of anti-Semitism, with
the result that "what was one of the decisive impulses of
the eighteenth century Enlightenment may function today as a
manifestation of provincial sectarianism or even as a paranoid
system." According to the investigations discussed here, one
of the wellsprings of anti-Semitic ideology lies in the long term
effects of class structure. In other words, the fact that "human
society has been up to now divided into classes affects more than
the external relations of man. The marks of social repression are
left within the individual soul." (Adorno et. al. 1950, p.
738; 742; 747) Thus the analysis of anti-Semitism is
simultaneously an analysis of structures of class and power;
investigations of prejudice necessarily involve a reconstruction
of the history and impact of anti-Semitic thought and stereotyped
perception in general, thereby opening up a perspective on the
genesis of domination itself. In Adorno's words, the history of
anti-Semitism "is not its own history, but the political and
social history of the world in which it fulfills a pernicious
function". (Adorno, "Remarks") A social world,
whose civilization "enkindles, through its own
mercilessness, precisely those tendencies that prove hostile
toward it" (Horkheimer 1985a, p. 174), and thus without a
critique of its material foundation no clear picture of its
ideological dispositions can be achieved.
Through a genetic reconstruction of the modernization of
traditional structures of prejudice into anti-Semitic delusion,
critical theory arrives at a comprehensive critique of general
societal conditions. Of course, the primarily social-psychological
orientation of the epochal Studies in Prejudice, - which,
despite plans to the contrary, were not continued after Adorno
and Horkheimer's return to Frankfurt - must today, a half century
after their appearance, be augmented by a more precise economic
critique of accelerating trends of reification. This is the
course recently charted, with unique conceptual precision, by the
sociologist Moishe Postone in his extensive study Time, Labor
and Social Domination. Postone places Marx's "critique
of labor in capitalism" and the "reinterpreted concept
of alienation" into the "center of his critique of
society". (Postone 1993, p. 17) His insistence on a strong
concept of social totality places him in close proximity to
critical theory, which similarly wanted "to move beyond the
limits of the present totality by limiting itself historically"
and also chose to operate within the Marxian framework, because
its "immanent critique of capitalism is such that the
indication of the historical specificity of the object of thought
reflexively implies the historical specificity of his theory,
that is the thought itself grasps the object."12 Materialist theory
must work itself out on the objects that it interrogates. Only if
this is the case will its concepts remain flexible enough to
accommodate historical transformations and its aims remain true
to the words of Horkheimer, who, in another passage of the speech
quoted at the outset of this essay, warned that the university
must not "shut itself off from the profound particularities
of modern life." (Horkheimer 1985, p. 384)
References
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(c) Social Thought and Research, Vol 21, No. 1&2,
1998 (ISSN 1094-5830)
Contact to the Editors: The University of Kansas, Social Thought
& Research, Department of Sociology, 716 Frazer Hall,
Lawrence KS 66045-2172
E-mail: mars@eagle.cc.ukans.edu