Gordon, Peter E.

intellectual historian at Harvard University, author of the introduction to the new Verso edition of The Authoritarian Personality

The speaker is addressed as "Peter" and "Professor Gordon"; he is identified by his Harvard colleagues and his work on the Verso edition. The chair, who refers to an opening introduction by Katia Genel, and several audience members, including a Brazilian researcher, are not named.

Between Realism and Utopia. Reflections on Adorno and “The Authoritarian Personality”

Andrea Cirla · Apr 5, 2025 · partial coverage

• Theodor Adorno
• The Authoritarian Personality
• Frankfurt School
• critical theory
• self-reflexivity
• F-scale
• utopia
• culture industry
• authoritarianism
• Trumpism

Coverage note: full - automatic transcript of a lecture of about fifty minutes followed by a long discussion.

Core ideas

Gordon starts from the requirement of "self-reflexivity": a comprehensive theory of society must be able to explain its own appearance, so it cannot describe the whole of society as false consciousness without undermining itself. Marx answered this with immanent critique, Hegel with absolute knowing, and Bourdieu with a modest reflexive sociology. Horkheimer's "Traditional and Critical Theory" (1937) made it the mark of critical theory, though Gordon notes its tidy dualisms lack dialectical mediation. He asks whether the Frankfurt School's empirical research meets this standard, taking The Authoritarian Personality (1950), one of five Studies in Prejudice sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. He places it among American studies of mass conformity (Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, The Organization Man, Middletown, Gallup), which in Sarah Igo's account helped create the "averaged American", an example of Ian Hacking's "looping effect". Adorno, scornful of the "administrative research" of Lazarsfeld's radio project, remembered the Berkeley collaboration with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Nevitt Sanford and Daniel Levinson warmly, as a free union of psychoanalysis and American empiricism.

The book's claims are less bold than they seem. It seeks only a correlation between personality structure and receptivity to fascist propaganda, not a psychological cause of fascism. Adorno insisted on the primacy of objective social factors and called the psychologistic reading a "democratic misunderstanding". The F-scale, built from some 2,000 questionnaires of white, non-Jewish, middle-class Californians, still encourages an illusion of liberal atomism. It sets the profile of "high scorers" (conventionalism, submission, aggression, stereotypy, cynicism, obsession with sexual transgression) against "low scorers", as in the opening contrast of "Mack" and "Larry". In chapter 17, written by Adorno alone, the culture-industry thesis returns. Standardization blurs the line between high and low scorers, and the very bourgeois individual that psychoanalysis studied is dissolving. In the section "There will be no utopia", Adorno finds anti-utopianism among both groups, but for opposite reasons. High scorers bow to the "overwhelming superiority of the existent". Low scorers are sceptical because they take utopia seriously and still trust human potential "in the depths of their hearts". Gordon reads this portrait as Adorno's self-reflexive mirror image: a dialectic of realism and utopia. The book's ending is more optimistic than the Frankfurt School's reputation, since it links any cure to a change in the total organization of society.

In a coda on the present, Gordon argues that three categories have weakened. Psychology, because advertising, social media and firms like Cambridge Analytica now shape the psyche they claim to measure, turning description into manipulation. Ideology, because Trumpism, unlike more coherent parties he would call neofascist such as Fidesz or the Rassemblement national, has no stable doctrine beyond narcissism and racism as "negative integration", and works through cultural style and tribal identification. Critique, because in "the algorithm" (Zadie Smith's phrase) critical theory risks becoming an embattled academic minority. It must still hold both realism and utopia. In discussion he recalls the criticisms of the study (confirmation bias, no left-wing authoritarianism). He says the one question he would ask today is "where do you get your information?", and notes how today's right combines conformity with a self-image of rebellion, as in Trump's staged loss of restraint. He admits overstating "the end of ideology" given Sanders and Warren. He defends Adorno against the charge of resignation, compares the terms authoritarianism, populism and neofascism, and ends on autonomous art as a fragile utopia threatened by commodification, which he simply calls "capitalism".

Excerpts