Re-Reading Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality in an Age of Authoritarianism

We live in an era where authoritarians are on the march in Hungary, Russia, Brazil, India, Turkey, the United States, and a disturbingly long list of other countries. Russia’s brutal ongoing invasion of Ukraine demonstrates that many authoritarians won’t stop at their own borders. The authoritarian wave of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s offers us an obvious parallel. In August 2019, Verso released a new edition of The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a study conducted after World War II by social psychologists including the noted Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno. The observations about authoritarian psychology that it contains have…