One of the most disturbing questions to emerge from the twentieth century—and one that haunted the thinkers of the Frankfurt School—was this: Why do so many people willingly submit to domination? Why do they support leaders and systems that manipulate, exploit, and even destroy them? The rise of fascism in Europe, and particularly Nazism in Germany, could not be explained by economic crisis alone. There had to be deeper forces at work—psychological, emotional, and cultural.
In response to this challenge, a group of Frankfurt-affiliated researchers, including Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, undertook a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study. The result was The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a monumental investigation into the psychological predispositions that made individuals susceptible to authoritarian ideologies.
The Authoritarian Personality Structure
Rather than imagining fascism as a political aberration or the product of a few "bad actors," Adorno and his colleagues sought to identify psychological patterns that predispose ordinary people to authoritarianism. They found a constellation of traits—rigid thinking, conformity to conventional norms, submission to authority figures, hostility toward outgroups—that tended to cluster together in what they called the “authoritarian personality.”
This type was shaped by a particular family dynamic: a strict, punitive father; a repressed and dependent mother; a child who learns to obey, to fear deviance, and to displace aggression onto weaker others. The result is a character structure deeply invested in hierarchy, control, and order, yet filled with unconscious rage and ambivalence.
These traits were not limited to any one political ideology. What mattered was the structure: the yearning for certainty, for authority, for an external force to resolve inner conflict and social ambiguity.
The F-Scale and the Fear of Difference
To measure this syndrome, the research team developed the now-famous F-Scale (F for "fascism"), a questionnaire designed to assess authoritarian tendencies. Questions focused on traits like submission to authority, aggression toward outsiders, and rigid adherence to traditional values.
The findings suggested that authoritarianism was less about ideology per se and more about a personality disposition. This explained why individuals could swing from one authoritarian allegiance to another—from fascism to Stalinism, for example—without a change in psychological structure.
What authoritarian personalities feared most was not injustice, but disorder. They perceived ambiguity, complexity, and difference as threats—and sought to suppress them. Prejudice, in this view, was not merely ignorance; it was a psychological defense mechanism.
Mass Psychology and Modern Society
The Frankfurt School’s analysis went beyond individual psychology. In modern mass society, they argued, certain social structures and cultural forces actively cultivate authoritarian tendencies. Bureaucracies reduce personal responsibility; mass media promote conformity and spectacle; economic insecurity fosters anxiety and resentment.
This environment creates fertile ground for authoritarian leaders, who promise clarity, strength, and a return to order. They offer psychological relief to those overwhelmed by modern complexity. In return, they demand loyalty and submission.
The appeal of authoritarianism is thus not only political but emotional. It fulfills a desire to belong, to obey, to dissolve the burden of freedom into the comfort of identification with a powerful figure.
Resistance Through Self-Reflection and Education
If authoritarianism is rooted in psychological and cultural formations, how can it be resisted?
For the Frankfurt School, the answer lay not in moral condemnation or political slogans, but in education, psychoanalysis, and critical reflection. Individuals had to become aware of the unconscious mechanisms driving their behavior. They had to learn to tolerate ambiguity, to think historically, to recognize in the stranger not a threat but a mirror.
Adorno spoke of the need for a kind of “working through”—a process of self-education that would make people resistant to the appeals of authoritarianism. This, he believed, was the task of critical pedagogy: to cultivate not just knowledge, but autonomy, empathy, and the courage to think otherwise.
Authoritarianism Today
The authoritarian personality has not disappeared. Its features are visible today in forms old and new: in populist strongmen, conspiracy movements, xenophobic politics, and digital echo chambers that reinforce rigid belief.
What Adorno and his colleagues offered was not a final answer, but a method: to analyze how power takes root in the psyche, and to understand that political resistance must also be psychological. Freedom, they remind us, is not just a structure—it is a character, patiently formed in the space between self-knowledge and solidarity.