Authoritarianism, Ambivalence, Ambiguity

Abstract

This Special Issue of Serendipities.Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences deals with the works of the psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik (1908-1958), known to some for her research into authoritarianism, especially as one of the co-authors of the famous study The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford 1950).This study without doubt had a crucial impact on social psychology in general and the research on authoritarianism in particular.In recent years, the rise of authoritarianism in the shape of Trump in the US, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Le Pen in France, the AfD in Germany, and the FPÖ in Austria, to name but a few, has prompted renewed interest in the original study and reinvigorated intense debate about it, not least following historian Peter E. Gordon's republication of the study and Special Issues of South Atlantic Quarterly and Polity organized by Robyn Marasco and others. 1 From the point of view of the history of the social sciences, the reevaluation of The Authoritarian Personality falls into a period that we might term the "twilight of the idols."Landmark social psychological projects of the mid-20 th century, most prominently the experiments by Stanley Milgram and Philipp Zimbardo, have been part of a public academic discourse for decades.In recent years, there has been a trend to reevaluate these studies by way of archival research.In both the cases of the Milgram Experiment (Perry 2013;Reicher et al. 2012) and Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment (Le Texier 2018; 2019; Blum 2018), the opening of the archives has led researchers to believe that crucial methodological shortcomings question the validity of the results.In the first case, the Yale Archives revealed that the experimenters in Stanley Milgram's famous experiment had induced the participants to give electro shocks to the unwilling "learners" to a far greater extent than previously thought (see Smeulers 2020, 222-225)."Induction" and acting were far more of a topic in the 1 Peter E. Gordon's excellent essay on Reading the Authoritarian Personality in the Age of Trump (Gordon 2018), originally published after Trump's election victory in 2016, was followed by his 2020 republication of the original study with Verso, London, including a formerly unpublished essay by Theodor W. Adorno intended as a draft of the study's conclusion.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.