Of Fear and Strangers by George Makari

Author:George Makari [Makari, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Theodor Adorno

Adorno acutely felt his homelessness. In Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, his mix of autobiography and philosophical epigraphs, he wrote: “The past life of the emigres’ is, as we know, annulled.” “For a man who no longer has a homeland,” he added, “writing becomes a place to live.” Thus he came upon his solution. Feverishly, he wrote.

In a span of six years, Adorno completed three major works, all of which involved his interlocuter, Max Horkheimer. Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia was first conceived of as a birthday gift for Max. The two men then cowrote a cri de coeur called Dialectic of Enlightenment. At first glance, this work seemed perverse. Instead of following the liberal attack on fascism as a group regression from civility to tribal barbarism, Adorno and Horkheimer attacked the Enlightenment. That project of banishing premodern myth and defeating fear with science and reason had become its own antithesis, they contended. Scientific demand for certainty had resulted in a desiccated Cartesian man, whose intolerance of mystery resulted in the need to dominate not just nature but also other men. “Progress,” that once liberating force, had become totalitarian. Circulated secretly for years, this influential work was published by a Dutch press in 1947. By then, the authors had added a final section on anti-Semitism that foreshadowed their next effort.

After saving many European scholars by sponsoring their emigration, the Institute for Social Research was dangerously low on funds. Adorno himself was impoverished and at times desperate. He played with the idea of training to become a psychoanalyst so as to make his way out of penury. Then, Horkheimer approached the American Jewish Committee with a proposal to edit a series of book-length studies on anti-Semitism. Anxious to make sure Nazism did not take root in the United States, the sponsors agreed to fund the most “exhaustive study of prejudice ever attempted.”

The AJC research series that emerged was called Studies in Prejudice, but its five publications would be eclipsed by one. At just under 1000 pages, The Authoritarian Personality contained a mass of empirical studies conducted by a group of six psychologists. The lead author, tasked with the job of pulling all this together, was Adorno. To do so, he would argue that defenses like Freudian projection were commonplace for those who grew up under brutal patriarchs at home. Such upbringings laid the groundwork for men and women who were submissive followers of tyrants as well as angry, scapegoating anti-Semites.

In all this, Adorno leaned on research conducted in Germany by his Frankfurt colleagues. As the ranks of Nazis swelled, Horkheimer had been bewildered by the failure of the proletariat to act in its own self-interest. He had commissioned Erich Fromm, the new head of the Institute’s social psychology division, to study why the working class had not risen up against the Fascists. Over 3000 questionnaires were distributed and analyzed for the presence of three character types: the Authoritarian, the Revolutionary, and the Ambivalent. This turn to character

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