From the 'Authoritarian' to the 'Neo-Liberal' Personality

From the Authoritarian to Neo-Liberal Personality This essay was presented at both the “Der aufrechte Gang im Windschiefen Kapitalismus Tagung” and at the Freud Museum in London in January, 2016. I wish to thank Dan Adleman, Johan Hartle, , Hilda Fernandez, Christopher “Kit” Fortune, Jay Frankel, , Christoph Henning, Lene Auestad Max Pensky, Lucia Pradella, and Jonathan Sklar and for their comments on previous iterations of it. Samir Gandesha “Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt and not atonement.” Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” unpublished fragment, 1921 Selected Writings Volume I, (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996): 288-292. Contemporary neo-liberal capitalism can be said to be characterized by two significant features. On the one hand, a staggering increase in social and economic inequality since the mid-1970s. For example, since 1977, sixty per cent of the increase in U.S. national income has gone to the top ten per cent. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard, 2014). Combined with a constellation of forces and tendencies, for example increasing investment in fixed capital and technical innovation such as intensifying automation, this inequality will likely only increase in coming years and decades. On the other, in place of a robust, radically democratic challenge to the growth of an inequality so great that it shakes the very foundations of the political order, the rise in support for authoritarian populist political movements throughout Europe and North America proceeds apace. By authoritarian populist movements I simply mean those movements that purport to embody or represent the will of the “people,” understood in narrow ethno-national terms, defined in opposition to a “power-bloc.” This was exemplified most dramatically by the breakthrough by the Front National, which came out on top in the first round in the recent regional elections in France—an advance that was only halted in the second by expedient tactical voting on the part of the French Socialists. http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/france-regional-elections-national-front-1.3362965 The United States, of course, has witnessed the rise of Donald Trump as the front-runner for Republican Presidential nomination on the basis of an unapologetically racist and profoundly xenophobic agenda that has sought, explicitly, to target Mexican immigration and has proposed a complete ban on Muslims entering the country. How is it possible to account for this strange and profoundly troubling conjunction of deepening socio-economic inequality and the growing rise of authoritarian populism and ethno-nationalist extremism? From the militant left, commentators such as Stathis Kouvelakis have argued that neo-fascist political parties are anti-systemic movements that, nonetheless, seek to preserve existing order of property relations. Kouvelakis argues that, Nonetheless, it is precisely this aspect of the FN – its capacity to capture and ‘hegemonise’ a form of popular revolt – that means that any ‘republican front’ strategy, whether a partial or a total one, can only feed it, legitimising its discourse of ‘us against all the rest’ and its self-proclaimed status as the only force opposing ‘the system’ – even ‘radically’ so. Stathis Kouvelakis, http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2399-the-french-disaster-stathis-kouvelakis-on-the-front-national-and-disintegration-of-the-left. Accessed, December 31, 2015.  According to Kouvelakis, the FN has managed to enjoy such success precisely because they occupy terrain that has been almost entirely vacated by an anti-capitalist left unable to challenge the existing power bloc through a counter-hegemonic project of its own that would pose a legitimate alternative to neo-liberal capital in general and austerity in particular. In contrast, social democrats such as Jürgen Habermas, in his recent writings on the deepening the crisis of Europe, have argued that the crisis is one of political institutions or, to be more precise, a problem can be understood in a lack of political institutionalization: a Euro zone without common foreign and fiscal policies and legal order that could be said to embody the public will of a genuinely post-national constellation. Here it is less a matter of transforming capital as it is a question of bringing the economic and political subsystems under the sway of the symbolically-mediated forms of communication embodied in of the life-world, See Jürgen Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union: A Response, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, UK: Polity books, 2012). although, as we have seen in recent years, the crucial question of whether it is possible to speak of a single European life-world shared by both, northern and southern Europe, Germany and Greece, of course, is a confounding sociological question. As Habermas states, “Since 1989-90 it has become impossible to break out of the universe of capitalism; the only remaining option is to civilize or tame the capitalist dynamic from within.” The Crisis of the European Union, 106. What appears to be lacking in both of the above accounts of the crisis is the recognition of the need for an explanation of the growth of a palpable susceptibility amongst citizens, noted above, to authoritarian rather than radically democratic solutions to the crisis of the capitalist social order that ultimately threatens liberal-democracy not from the outside but from within. T.W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998): 90. So: is the crisis simply one of politics and ideology? Is it a crisis simply of failed or incomplete institutionalization? Or is the crisis deeper than this and one that has to do with the formation of democratic subjectivity itself? Aside from isolated and sporadic instances, why have citizens not been convincingly mobilized within civil society to transform an order characterized not only by growing inequality but also by the catastrophic environmental destructiveness of a social order that places its own continued, long-term viability in question? As I have suggested elsewhere, Samir Gandesha, “The Political Semiosis of Populism,” The Semiotic Review of Books 13.3 (2003): 1-7. far from including the other in public discourse, authoritarian populist movements have effectively constituted immigrants, blacks, asylum seekers, refugees, etc. as the enemy, as an existential threat to the community’s “entire way of life.” And the manner in which such an enemy is constructed, is through an affectively-charged language of disgust See “Donald Trump and the Politics of Disgust,” in The New Republic, December 31, 2015. https://newrepublic.com/article/126837/donald-trump-politics-disgust. Accessed January 2, 2016. that constitutes the stranger as an uncanny (Unheimliche), abject and, therefore deeply threatening presence who is incapable of the mutuality of discourse, and that must be, therefore, excluded--if necessary, violently--from the body politic. Not unlike the tropes and images through which National Socialist propaganda depicted the Jews, contemporary right-wing populism constitutes the other in dehumanizing terms designed to maximize public disgust and fear: images of disease, bodily wastes, as insects and vermin that threaten to overwhelm and destroy the body politic and can only be confronted by exclusionary policies that occasionally require the suspension of constitutional legality. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno suggest in the last year of the Second World War, this constitutes the drive to eliminate the non-identical; in the attempt to bring nature under the sway of technical control and mastery, whatever residue of uncontrolled or, indeed, uncontrollable, nature remains elicits an automatic response of revulsion: the grating sound of the stylus moving over a slate, the haut gout which recalls filth and decomposition, the sweat which appears on the brow of a busy man—everything which has failed to keep up, or which infringes the commandments which are the sedimented progress of the centuries—has a penetrating effect; it arouses disgust. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Jephcott, 180. These developments appear, at least on first glance, to profoundly contradict the justification for the neo-liberal reconstitution of contemporary capitalist social relations dating back at least to the mid-1970’s if not earlier. Such a justification held that the preponderance of market mechanisms would re-orient social relations on sound, which is to say, free and rational foundations. These were understood in terms of rational choice, on the basis of the individual’s (rather than the “bureaucratic” state’s) capacity to make utility-maximizing decisions in the areas of, for example, health care or education. This rationale holds that the conditions of social life will, in fact, be far less encumbered by atavistic allegiances, xenophobic nationalism, racism, sexism, etc. in direct proportion to the preponderance of market rationality as the basis for allocating social goods. The market alone can achieve the kind of smooth equilibrium that always must elude the irrationality of state, management, coordination and control. The supposedly enlightening function of neo-liberalism at the level of the individual had been precisely the opposite effect and one could say not just in Europe and North America but also in the so-called “Gujurat model” under Narendra Modi on the Indian subcontinent, insofar as it has also unleashed atavistic tendencies. Rather than contributing to the conditions of political “maturity,” which is to say, a capacity to autonomously and rationally articulate one’s own interests within the context of a genuine plurality of other such interests, it has led to a seeming surplus of aggressiveness, humiliation and guilt. Belgian psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe has recently remarked “meritocratic neoliberalism favours certain personality traits and penalizes others.” Many of these traits he considers to be clinically pathological. Neo-liberal capitalism encourages, in his view, superficial articulateness, duplicity and mendacity, reckless, risk-taking behavior, in place of autonomy, dependence on ever-shifting norms, etc. Verhaeghe argues that, Our society constantly proclaims that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough, all the while reinforcing privilege and putting increasing pressure on its overstretched and exhausted citizens. An increasing number of people fail, feeling humiliated, guilty and ashamed. We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited. Furthermore, those who fail are deemed to be losers or scroungers, taking advantage of our social security system. Paul Verhaeghe, “Neo-liberalism Has Brought Out the Worst in Us,” Guardian, September 29th, 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/29/neoliberalism-economic-system-ethics-personality-psychopathicsthic Accessed January 1, 2016. The proliferation of these psychological traits has arisen in tandem with the growth of authoritarian and exclusionary forms of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, as I just suggested. And the combined effect of these developments is to profoundly weaken democratic attitudes, practices and institutions. My question in this paper is to what extent is it possible to revisit Adorno’s concept of the “authoritarian personality,” as Alan Wolfe and others have recently suggested Alan Wolfe, “The ‘Authoritarian Personality’ Revisited,” The Chronicle of Higher education, October 7, 2005. in order to at least begin to clarify this seemingly paradoxical conjunction of deepening inequality and right-wing populism? Arguably, Adorno and the entire first generation of Critical Theory can be understood as seeking to provide, through an appropriation of psychoanalysis and cultural critique more generally, an account of a crisis of subjectivity and experience that would constitutes a much needed corrective to materialist theories of the “objective” crisis of capitalism that pointed towards a radical transformation of capitalism that never, ultimately, came to pass. See Samir Gandesha, “The Frankfurt School,” in the Wiley Encyclopedia of Political Thought, 2014. Adorno famously describes this as “The moment to realize philosophy that was missed.” T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum): Today, a return to the psychoanalytical dimension of Critical Theory would seem to be necessitated by the fact that, in the face of evidence that neoliberal policies not only do not work, their effects can actually be counter-productive and deeply damaging, which is to say economically self-undermining. Nevertheless, they continue to be pursued with redoubled fervor by states with, apart from certain notable exceptions, more or less the full, if passive, acquiescence of their citizens. Of course, the recent ascension as Labour Party leader in the UK of Jeremy Corbyn as well as the challenge offered by Bernie Sanders to Hilary Clinton’s bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination is something of a countervailing tendency insofar as they both, each in their own ways, draw upon a high level of grass-roots organizing. For example, one year after the OECD produced a report clearly outlining potentially disastrous, deflationary effects ala Japan of neo-liberal policies, there is little evidence of any of its member countries having materially altered course or planning to do so in the foreseeable future. OED Economic Outlook, November, 2014. http://www.oecd.org/eco/outlook/General-assessment-of-the-macroeconomic-situation.pdf Psychoanalysis therefore provides us with an important means by which we can locate the limits of the still prevailing understanding of politics that assumes the rationality of subjects in pursuing their own self-interests. A particularly illustrative case of this was revealed in the 2010 mid-term US elections, during which time Guardian writer, Gary Younge, interviewed a poor white woman protesting President Obama’s appearance at a campaign event for Democratic incumbent Harry Reid. The woman who aggressively, indeed abusively, aired her opposition to the migration of undocumented workers from south of the border. When asked about whether her life had been materially improved by the Obama administration’s comparatively progressive healthcare, unemployment insurance and taxation policies, she demurred. When Younge pushed her to respond specifically to the question of whether Obamacare wasn’t a good thing for people in her position, she replied that “To be honest, I’ve never really been into the whole Obamacare thing, because what is really making me ill are all the “illegals” coming over the border.” http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2010/oct/29/younge-america-great-divide. Accessed Jan 2, 2016. She expressed her disaffection for the “illegals” having large families and living off of public funds. However, as it turned out, that past year, Nevada had, in fact, experienced a net loss of 50,000 unauthorized immigrants. Psychoanalysis can provide insight into the manner in which individuals participate, actively and affectively, through the powerful emotions of love and hate, and through the way they establish their relations with “otherness,” in reproducing the conditions of their own domination and undermining their own material interests. In the case of the poor white woman, one could say, what is undermined is an interest in self-preservation, itself, insofar as a lack of medical insurance in the U.S. is, of course, potentially catastrophic. As a consequence, psychoanalysis can also point in the direction, therefore, of helping to identify the limits and possibilities of genuine democratic self-determination and will formation. The idea that lies at the center of the concept of the “authoritarian personality,” namely “the identification with the aggressor,” is, rather, what the pre-eminent English-language Adorno translator and interpreter, Bob Hullot-Kentor, calls his “vade mecum” Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006): 11. or touch-stone. In fact, Adorno’s concern with the problem of the identification with the aggressor was, for him after 1933, an existential problem of how to resist the pressures confronted by any displaced person or refugee to resist the enormous pressure to assimilate to his or her new homeland or place of refuge. Referring both to their own predicament as well as that of those whose fate was far worse, Adorno states with Horkheimer, with reference to an order that is installing itself as totalitarian, Everything must be used and all must obey. The mere existence of the other is a provocation. Every ‘other’ person who ‘doesn’t know his place’ must be forced back within his proper confines—those of unrestricted terror. Anyone who seeks refuge must be prevented from finding it; those who express ideas which all long for, peace, a home, freedom—the nomads and players—have always been refused a homeland. Dialectic of Enlightenment, 183 Adorno refers to the connection between this existential reality he faced in American exile and the development of the arguments of what was to become his book Negative Dialectics. As he says in the lecture presented at the University of Frankfurt on November 11th, 1965, in which he discusses Hegelian claim that the “negation of the negation” results in positivity: I cannot resist telling you that my eyes were opened to the dubious nature of this concept of positivity only in emigration, where people found themselves under pressure from the society around them and had to adapt to very extreme circumstances. In order to succeed in this process of adaptation, in order to do just to what they were forced to do, you would hear them say, by way of encouragement—and you could see the effort it cost them to identify with the aggressor—‘Yes, so-and-so is really very positive… T.W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008): 17. After elaborating on this point, Adorno goes on to say that “For this reason, therefore, we might say, putting it in dialectical terms, that what appears to be positive is essentially the negative, i.e. the thing that is to be criticized.” Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 18-19.  In other words, what appears as “positive,” ultimately harbours the “non-identical” which it violently assimilates through the act of subsumption. So, in fact, the idea of the identification with the aggressor could be said to lie very much at the heart of Adorno’s philosophy, his negative dialectics, as a whole. In what follows, then, I first discuss some of the central features of the concept of the “authoritarian personality,” and then proceed to outline some of the substantive criticisms of the study itself as well as some of its underlying psychological and sociological assumptions. If the concept of the authoritarian personality is to be made available to understand the personality structure of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism, two key criticisms must be addressed, in particular. The first is the study’s reliance on the now questionable concept of “state capitalism.” While it is far from clear that we have, in any straight-forward way, entered a period in which the state has simply withdrawn in exact proportion to the extent that market forces have re-asserted themselves, if the concept of the authoritarian personality is to be viable, it must be articulated in a way that is sensitive to both the identity and difference in the conditions of contemporary capitalism. The second is the study’s reliance on a normative Freudian understanding of the process ego formation through the conflict with the father. This, I suggest, can, in part, be addressed by leaning slightly more heavily on Sandor Ferenczi’s original formulation of the idea of the “identification with the aggressor”--which itself entails a constellation of the concepts of “identification,” “introjection” and “dissociation”—and shifts emphasis towards the “pre-Oedipal” phase of development, Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black, Freud and Beyond (New York: Basic Books, 1995): 21. and doesn’t, in the process, marginalize the role of the mother. If these two criticisms can be convincingly addressed, then perhaps it may be possible to develop the idea of a “neo-liberal personality” which might, in turn, enable us to sketch a provisional answer to the question I posed at the outset: namely how can we understand the conjunction of staggering inequality with the rise of authoritarian populist movements rather than social movements that seek a structural transformation of the conditions of such social inequality? I. The Authoritarian Personality The concept of the authoritarian personality is to be understood in the context of a constellation of concerns that lie at the heart of the first generation of Critical Theory. Lying at the heart of this are early the studies in the 1920s of political attitudes of German workers, Horkheimer's notion of the "anthropology of the bourgeois epoch," Max Horkheimer, “Egoism and Freedom Movements.” Until John Abromeit’s extensive discussion of this text in his magisterial intellectual biography of Horkheimer, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2011) this important text was largely overlooked. his 1930s studies of authority and the family, Adorno's lectures and public lectures and radio interviews from mid-1960’s and, of course, the monumental though much-impugned collaborative Berkeley Public Opinion study culminating in the publication of the Authoritarian Personality, itself, published in 1950. It is worth noting that in the same year, Donald Winnicott delivered a talk that poses a question of the relationship between individual psychological and political maturity that parallels in interesting ways Adorno and his colleagues.D.W. Winnicott, “Some Thoughts on the Meaning of the Word ‘Democracy,’ in D. W. Winnicott, Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst (London: penguin, 1986): 239-59. A key and extremely influential contribution in this respect was made by Erich Fromm in his book Escape from Freedom, in which he sought to integrate social and psychological approaches through a concept of “social character.” The importance of this work cannot be over-emphasized insofar as it sought to bring together the work of Marx and Freud whose basic assumptions about relation between the individual and society were, to say the least, not easily reconciled. Fromm argued that social character had to be understood as mediating between the needs and drives of the individual, on the one hand, and social roles, norms and practices, on the other. Social character represented a patterned response to the contradictory nature of drives and needs and social demands. Fromm’s research employed this concept in studying the political attitudes of German workers and concluded that while superficially progressive, their deep, underlying personality structure was profoundly conservative. If the arguments of Escape from Freedom were received by Adorno and some of the other members with a certain ambivalence, the concept of the “authoritarian personality” can be said to be most closely tied to the arguments of the book that Adorno co-authored with Max Horkheimer, and to which I’ve already referred, that initially took the form of a set of conversations in the early 1940s transcribed by Gretel Adorno entitled Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment). In his talk, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” Adorno states that the “Elements of Anti-Semitism” chapter of this text was “determinative” for his participation in the collective authorship with Levinson et. al. of The Authoritarian Personality. T. W. Adorno, “The Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” Critical Models, 230. Dialectic of Enlightenment itself drew upon Adorno’s lecture from a decade earlier entitled “The Idea of Natural-History” that sought to re-orient and transform the typical understandings of both “nature” as the space of law-like regularities, and “history,” as the space of the event-like appearance of the new. Rather than embodying a negative philosophy of history that engages in a “totalizing critique of reason,” as Habermas argues, the text aims, as Max Pensky has shown, at a de-familiarizing critique, a kind of shock experience, of capitalist society as it was entering into a historic crisis in the 1930s. At its most natural, nature was grasped as historical and history, at its most historical, was presented as nature. In other words, the history of capitalist social relations was understood in terms of a category drawn from Lukacs of “second nature,” the apparently immutable or eternal laws of nature, based on an unending struggle for existence. And, at the same time, “nature” was the site of history, that is, unprecedented “events,” for example as the splitting of the atom. Today, of course, we could include, in this idea of nature as the site of the “new,” the idea of the Anthropocene as the advent of an unprecedented geological epoch as result of social and historical practices distinguished by irreversible and quite possibly catastrophic human impact on the planetary ecosystem. And between the two there is a close mutually-conditioning relation: the seeming absence of alternatives to a naturalized neo-liberal capitalist order locks into place an accelerating historical transformation of the natural eco-system with its mass extinctions and dramatically altered climatic systems which, themselves, produce further positive and ever-more dangerously unpredictable feedback loops. Here Aufklärung understood as the deepening reliance on anonymous, impersonal forces, while promising to liberate human beings from superstition and mythological forms of thinking, and in the process to promote autonomy actually undermines this very autonomy. “A thoroughly enlightened world,” according to Horkheimer and Adorno, ‘radiates disaster triumphant.” Aufklärung, or the human attempt to bring external nature under rational control and domination through technical procedures, undermines Mündigkeit the ability to speak for oneself or a condition of political maturity because the mastery and control of nature requires social conformism and domination. The basic argument is that enlightenment is the means by which the species secures its survival, however, but grossly overshoots its mark and threatens, the very life that the machinic ratio of enlightenment sought to preserve in the first place. (This is, incidentally, our current predicament today.) While enlightenment doesn’t simply aim at the mere preservation of “bare life,” but rather promises happiness (Eudaimonia literally: strong in-dwelling spirit) flourishing or the Good life, the quotidian existence of the self becomes meaningless and therefore, in this precise sense, de-spiritualized or lifeless. [DE quote] The setting of Beckett’s Endgame in a suffocating, clausterphobic bunker outside of which all is “kaput,” for example, represents the image of the “life that doesn’t live.” Lying at the heart of the concept of the authoritarian personality is the problem of ego weakness. The historical roots of the problem are already present in Horkheimer’s work from the 1930’s, the “Studien Über Authorität und Familie. In those studies, Horkheimer argues that under conditions of liberal capitalism, the classical Freudian account of the formation of the sources of moral agency—enlightenment or Mündigkeit—held sway. As Freud lays out in Lecture Twenty-one of his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, “The Development of Libido,”—as virtually everyone here knows--the male child’s ego is constituted through the Oedipal conflict with the father over the mother. The successful negotiation of the Oedipal conflict, for Freud, entails a recognition, on pain of castration, that the mother is off limits to the child and this moment of recognition is at the same time the internalization of the father’s law, which is to say, the formation of conscience or Super-Ego. Freud states that from the “very intense emotional processes that come into play” at the moment of this “infantile object-choice,” “From this point onwards, the human individual has to devote himself to the great task of detaching himself from his parents, and not until that task is achieved can he cease to be a child and become a member of the social community.” Sigmund Freud, Introductory lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1987: 380. However, where Freud, draws conservative inferences, Horkheimer draws more radical ones. In other words, the formation of the ego through the Oedipal conflict becomes the basis for the very autonomy that lies at the heart of the possibility of opposition to illegitimate authorities. The Oedipal conflict is itself, as it were, the site of a dialectic of enlightenment—it is the moment of individuation that makes possible a practical transcendence of a reified form of individuality. With the advent of what Friedrich Pollock comes to call in the 1940s “state capitalism,” we see the emergence of a social formation in which competition between individual firms is supplanted by the state which comes to play a greater “coordinating role” in managing the tendency towards over-production and under-consumption. As a result, the very logic of socialization changes dramatically in Horkheimer’s view. The father now is subject to a dramatic diminution of freedom and social power and his authority within the family begins to correspondingly decline. It leads to what Alexander Mitscherlich called a Society without Fathers. Alexander Mitscherlich, Society with the Father: A Contribution to Social Psychology, trans. Eric Mosbacher (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World Inc., 1963). The argument is that with the displacement of the imago of the father in the family and other social institutions, by an increasingly anonymous system of rational-legal authority, and the formation of the rational ego misfires and leads to its circumvention by the prevailing Super-ego that establishes its unquestioned authority over the drives. In other words, the individual lacks a secure focal point for identification and orientation. This, then, becomes the basis for the meta-psychological account of the Authoritarian Personality tested by Adorno and his collaborators via empirical research on the fascist potential among American university students. The relative weakness of the ego in relation to the societal Super-ego leads to an excessive form of obedience to external authorities. But, in order for this to be bearable, the authoritarian personality type evinces, as well, a high degree of aggressiveness to those who are relatively socially powerless. This is why the he is also called the sado-masochistic personality—that personality type who is sadistically cruel and potentially violent towards the weak and masochistically self-subordinating vis-à-vis the powerful. What the research showed, based on the so-called F or Fascist-Scale, that authoritarian personalities exhibited a cluster of traits although the reverse did not hold, in other words, anti-authoritarian personalities tended to be differentiated and did not share similar traits. These traits included a tendency towards stereotypy, a fear and hatred of difference, associated as it was with weakness, projectivity, and submissiveness towards existing authority, ego-weakness and so forth. In short, the authoritarian personality was a personality type who took up a cold, harsh attitude towards those who were comparatively powerless and were overly compliant with respect to the demands of the socially powerful. A conclusion drawn from the study is that because the attitudes towards members of the “out-group” amongst this group are irrational, they are not susceptible to reasoned arguments. Nor is the strategy of encouraging sympathy towards outside groups. Indeed, this may worsen the problem as it may exacerbate the hidden fear of weakness. II. Criticisms When it was published the Authoritarian Personality was beset by two basic criticisms: a. political and b. methodological. a. Normative Questions University of Chicago Sociologist, Edward Shils, criticized it for failing to address the authoritarianism of the left as well as the right, an argument that was first articulated by Hannah Arendt in the Origins of Totalitarianism. As Arendt argued both right and left premised their ideas on a basis of a philosophy of history. For the right, it was a Darwinian struggles of discrete racial groups for dominance, while for the left, history was the history of class struggle. b. Methodological failings Herbert H. Hyman and Paul B. Sheatsley pointed to various methodological failings with respect to sampling, the wording of certain questions in the questionnaire, questions having to do with causality, lack of verification of self-reporting on the part of the subjects, lack of coherence in the F-scale. To these normative and methodological criticisms we may add two more which are, overall, potentially more searching as they get to the heart of the larger theoretical assumptions upon which the study is based. The first is the conception of capitalism upon which the Horkheimer’s early studies on “Authority and the Family” is based. The second is a challenge to the patriarchal assumptions that underlie the orthodox Freudian metapsychology that informs the concept. The interrelation of these two theses, the transition from liberal to state capitalism (in either totalitarian or Keynesian form) and the changes in socialization and formation of moral agency, is made clear in the “Elements of Anti-Semitism” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment. I’m going to skip over the normative or political and methodological criticisms, although I would say that today the need to develop a criticism of the authoritarianism of the left as well as the right is particularly pressing. c. State Capitalism As previously suggested, Pollock’s idea of “state capitalism” as Pollock undergirds the theory and consisted of essentially three departures from the liberal form of capitalism it supersedes: 1. Direct controls replace the market; old and new devices are employed to secure the full employment of all resources and; 3. in its totalitarian form, this benefits only certain groups, whereas within democracies it benefits the people as a whole. It seems deeply questionable that any of these three features of state capitalism obtain today. 1. Market mechanisms have come to replace direct state controls. 2. Full-employment is no longer a desideratum of public policy See William Walters, Unemployment and Government: Genealogies of the Social (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).. And, 3. The concept of totalitarianism has, itself, been rendered obsolete in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and it is highly questionable that China could be characterized as totalitarian. Social policies in the West no longer, if they ever did, benefit the people as a whole. Be this all as it may, it is far from clear that the form of neo-liberal capitalism that has supplanted both totalitarian or Keynesian state capitalism can be characterized in an unproblematic way as a replacement of state or political institutions by market mechanisms. While it is not possible to engage in a fulsome discussion of this difficult question here, it is possible to make few remarks in this direction. While certain characterizations of neo-liberalism, such as that offered by Pierre Bourdieu, tend to suggest this, the consensus is that neo-liberalism doesn’t do away with the state but rather simply alters its role. So, in David Harvey’s influential view, neo-liberalism constitutes the return of a certain form of primitive accumulation or what he calls “accumulation by dispossession,” entailing four distinct processes: 1. Privatization and commodification; 2. Financialization; 3. The management and manipulation of crises; and, 4. State redistribution of wealth upwards. In Foucault’s account of neo-liberalism centering on a detailed analysis of the founding order of the post-1949 Federal Republic in Ordo-Liberalism, Foucault’s emphasis is on the manner in which, given its radical discontinuity state institutions were overtly grounded in the economic logic of the quickly accelerating Wirtschaftwunder. Significantly, neo-liberalism centered on a new mode of governmentality or the “conduct of conduct,” entailing a redoubled responsibilization of the subject—the subject was now responsible for making himself the center of entrepreneurial activity. Picking up on Harvey’s and Lapavistas’ emphasis on the growth and expansion of finance within neo-liberalism, Maurizio Lazzarato shows the way in which the state has come to play a key role, particularly after the crash of 2007-08, as the lender of last resort, which it assumes on the behalf of its citizens. The combination of sovereign or public and growing private debts for university education (in the Anglo-American world) and mortgages as well as personal consumption, leads to what he calls the “making of indebted man.” Through a reading of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, Lazzarato suggests that the objective relations of financial debt (Schulden) leads to a subjective condition of guilt (Schuld). Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of Indebted Man: An essay on the Neo-Liberal Condition (New York: Semiotext(e), 2012). This constellation, in his view, has played a key role in profoundly diminishing the possibilities of the kind of social solidarity that would be, itself, capable, of challenging the power of capital. The relation between creditor and debtor that, in his view, has come to actually supplant the capital-wage labour relation, is, therefore, far more than simply an economic relation but fundamentally, also, a political relation. Debt is, itself, a form of governance. d. “Identification with the Aggressor” Along with the presupposition of the Keynesian or totalitarian variants of state capitalism, another identifiable weakness in the concept of the authoritarian personality, as I’ve already suggested, is its reliance on Freudian psychoanalysis to provide a normative account of the development of the ego. There are two aspects of this critique. The first is that the general conception of the self in Freudian psychoanalysis as a monological or “closed system.” The second was its specific reliance on the assumption of a strong father figure to ground successful moral development. According to the first line of critique, Jessica Benjamin argues that, Within this closed system, the ego invests objects with his desire and takes in these objects to further his autonomy from them. This conception of the individual cannot explain the confrontation with an independent other as a real condition of development and change. It does not comprehend the process of transforming and simultaneously being transformed by the other. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Press, 1988): 49. It is perhaps for this reason that the general conception of the self within orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis, a conception of the humans as “drive regulating animals” in the words of Stephen Mitchell, has given way to a “more contemporary view of humans as meaning-generating animals.” Stephen A. Mitchel, Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1993): 23. The reliance on Freud’s account of the self, emphasizing the internal integration and organization of the drives in relation to the external requirements of society or civilization, ultimately relies on a Hobbesian account of civilization, as laid out inter alia in the speculative anthropology of the “primal horde” in Totem and Taboo, that sits rather uncomfortably with some of the underlying assumptions of Adorno’s social philosophy. More specifically, Jessica Benjamin argues that the concept of the Authoritarian personality relies upon the questionable patriarchal assumption that the normative development of the ego can occur only through its confrontation with and the internalization of the authority of a strong father. Benjamin states that “Rejecting the alternatives of internalized authority versus seamless conformity, we may still inquire into the impact of this culture upon the character of motherhood and domestic privacy. It is also important to consider the consequences of the possibility that the degendering and depersonalizing of authority allows both members to play the roles formerly restricted to one.” Jessica Benjamin, “Authority and the Family Revisited: Or, A World without Fathers?” New German Critique 13 (Winter, 1978): 35-57. If one considers Adorno’s immanent critique of Kant’s conception of autonomy in Negative Dialectics, or his idea of a dependence on an “otherness” that defies subsumption both in Dialectic of Enlightenment and elsewhere, as alluded to above, Adorno is, despite his reliance on the Freudian account of ego formation, actually much closer to Jessica Benjamin’s inter-subjective account of personality than would appear to be the case on first glance. Adorno makes this clear when, in a discussion of the Hegelian concept of Entäusserung he states that We become free human beings not by each of us realizing ourselves as individuals, according to the hideous phrase, but rather that we go out of ourselves, enter into relations with others, and in a certain sense relinquish ourselves to them. Only through this process do we determine ourselves as individuals, not by watering ourselves like plants in order to become well-rounded cultivated personalities. “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” 240. The similarities with the Lacanian account of the unconscious not as the deep structure of the mind but rather as existing in a condition of “extimacy”, that is, in the world through desire for desire is unmistakable. I’m indebted to the Lacanian psychoanalyst, Hilda Fernandez, for this insight. This is a rather different picture than that offered by Freud of an individual who is faced with the task of working through his neurotic symptoms by coming to terms with long repressed wishes from his childhood that return in dreams and parapraxes. It would make sense, therefore, to approach the concept of the authoritarian personality, in light of the notion “identification with the aggressor” in the work of Hungarian analyst Sandor Ferenczi. While Hullot-Kentor attributes the idea to Anna Freud's 1936 The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, the actual source of the idea is Ferenczi who introduced it in a paper (with which most of you I expect will be intimately familiar) entitled “Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and the Child (-The Confusion of the Language of Tenderness and Passion)” presented to the Twelfth International Psycho-analytical Congress in Wiesbaden in September, 1932, and then published the following year. S. Ferenczi, “Confusion of Tongues Between the Adults and the Child – (The Language of Tenderness and of Passion), International Journal of Psychoanalysis 30 (1949): 225-30. Jay Frankel, “Exploring Ferenczi's Concept of Identification with the Aggressor: Its Role in Trauma, Everyday Life, and the Therapeutic Relationship,” Pyschoanalytical Dialogues 12, (2002): 102. By drawing on Ferenczi, it might be possible to avoid some of the philosophical and historical problems associated with Freudian ego psychology, in particular, which, as I have already suggested, understands the individual in terms of a kind of monad or closed system (Adorno’s “well-watered plant”) in which the drives were understood to be integrated and the individual adjusted successfully to the prevailing reality principle. In contrast to Anna Freud’s understanding of the term, which suggests a momentary impersonation of the aggressor, in a sense reflecting back to him his own aggression, as a way of feeling for that time more secure, Ferenczi’s use of the term entails, according to the psychoanalyst, Jay Frankel, a “pervasive change in someone’s perceptual world…[and] about actually protecting oneself than about simply feeling more secure.” Frankel, “Exploring,”102-03. Drawing on his clinical experience with adults who had experienced a deeply traumatic encounter with an abusive adult in early childhood, Ferenzci reasoned that “identification with the aggressor” is a typical response to conditions of pervasive social and emotional insecurity. Ferenczi’s particular understanding of the concept is especially attractive for our purposes, insofar as a central feature of neo-liberal capitalism entails the direct destruction of an entire social security network through what Harvey describes as privatization and commodification, financialization, crisis management and upward re-distribution of wealth. The combined effect of these four processes of neo-liberalization is profoundly traumatic, insofar as they deepen and accelerate the struggle for existence that has always constituted the insecurity that characterizes capitalism at its core. It is a response to a situation in which, to quote Frankel again, we have lost our sense that the world will protect us, when we are in danger with no chance of escape. What we do is make ourselves disappear. This response goes beyond dissociation from present experience: like chameleons, we blend into the world around us, into the very thing that threatens us, in order to protect ourselves. We stop being ourselves and transform ourselves into someone else’s image of us. There are three dimensions of the identification with the aggressor that distinguishes it from Anna Freud’s, rather than a displaced aggression, what we find is compliance, accommodation and submission. And this works in the following way, as explained by Frankel: First, we mentally subordinate ourselves to the attacker. Second, this subordination lets us divine the aggressor’s desires—get into the attacker’s mind to know just what he is thinking or feeling, so that we can anticipate exactly what he is about to do and know how to maximize our own survival. And, third, we do the thing that we feel will save us: usually we make ourselves vanish through submission and a precisely attuned compliance with the attacker. Frankel, “Exploring,” 103. In response, far from repudiating or violently repulsing the malevolent adult, the child acquiesces and reflects back to the adult what the latter requires of her. As in the Stockholm Syndrome, according to which the hostage comes to identify with or even love his captor, the child identifies with the abusive adult. In addition to the process of identifying with the adult as a threatening external object, as an additional mechanism of defense, the child also introjects or transfers from external to internal reality the adult's guilt as a form of mastery of a force that, if it isn’t mastered, could actually threaten the integrity of the child’s ego. In particular, what the child introjects is the adult's guilt, by, herself, taking the blame for the event. Moreover, the child undergoes a process, particularly at the moment of assault, of splitting and dissociation—a distancing of that part of the child that experienced the violence.  We can understand these three moments in terms of the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s presentation of the formation of subjectivity that I outlined above. First, faced with a social world marked by a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” a state of nature that is in actual fact, the historical reality of capitalism, the individual must strengthen or harden himself up in order to be able to compete against others and therefore survive. He must subordinate himself to and therefore identify precisely with the external imperatives of the prevailing performance principle of this order by making himself competitive in relation to other individuals. At the same time, for individuals to do this successfully such an adaptation to the outside must be introjected or internalized. The individual must, therefore, renounce the claim to a fulfilled life and simple existence. The psychic cost of this dialectic of identification with and introjection of the external forces in the interest of self-preservation is a diminishment in the capacity of the self for experience and ultimately to act. The life that is to be preserved at all costs becomes, paradoxically, turned into a simply getting by; it becomes a kind of living death. Conclusion It seems to me that in place of an account of the way in which the transformation from liberal to state capitalism undermines the normative process of ego formation by undermining the father's authority, short-circuits the moral agency of the individual, an account that draws on Sandor Ferenczi's notion of the “identification with the aggressor” seems more promising for the reasons I have discussed. Moreover, in contrast to state capitalism that was premised upon the idea that capitalism embodied a contradiction between over-production and under consumption, the doctrine at the heart of neo-liberalism, namely monetarism, asserted an identity of interests between the power of money and society as a whole. Can the tripartite structure of identification, introjection and dissociation help us understand the paradox that with deepening inequality and social insecurity we see the emergence not of a strong, radical democratic opposition but, rather authoritarian parties and movements? It may do so in the following way. The on-going crisis conditions of the neo-liberal order constitute it as radically insecure than the one it replaces insofar as it comes into being through a roll back of formal and informal networks of solidarity and social security. It can therefore can be understood to be experienced as profoundly traumatic—since Margaret’s Thatcher’s infamous remark about the “short, sharp, shock,” it is often referred to as a kind of "shock therapy." As a way of surviving such shock-like conditions, subjects could be said to identify overwhelmingly--not with those social forces that would constitute a robust challenge to that order under conditions of solidarity with others facing similar forms of structural exclusion--but rather, paradoxically, with the very forces that maintain and benefit from those structures. They could be said to introject the aggressor’s blame for the very conditions of the crisis, itself. At the very outset, from Chile, in which the coup against Allende, constituted the first neo-liberal laboratory, to Ronald Regan’s attack on the Air Traffic Controllers to Thatcher’s attack on the Miners, working class organizations are blamed for the social and economic crisis of the Keynesian order and, of course, would have to soften if not renounce its demands henceforth. Today, of course, the white working class, which has seen its fortunes decline precipitously in the past thirty years, appears to be increasingly drawn to real estate mogul, Donald Trump, as the candidate for Presidential nomination for the Republican ticket. And, this entails, the third aspect of “identification with the aggressor,” which is to say, a dissociation from its own interests. Can there be any doubt that a Trump presidency would entail, in contrast top that of a Bernie Sanders, an exponential deepening of misery for the majority whom globalization has simply left behind. Yet, mimetic identification of the weak with strength appears to be the strategy for survival. The socially excluded can take vicarious pleasure in the bullying posture of a United States that expels Muslims and builds a wall on its southern border with Mexico to keep out the “rapists, murderers and drug dealers;” the proverbial “garbage” of Mexican society. So, as should be clear, the neo-liberal order—which is ever more abstract and anonymous in nature--with which individuals identify doesn't present itself as such. Rather it concretizes itself as a strong ethnic or national perhaps even racial body, often manifested in the figure of a putatively “strong” leader, that constitutes itself in a force-field against an alien enemy against which it purports to defends the marginalized and the excluded not just against such aliens but also against an increasingly venal political class. In fact, as Moishe Postone has argued in his sharp analysis of anti-semitism, grounded in his understanding of capitalism as a social relation mediated by abstract labour, this phenomenon represents, in displaced, one-sided and therefore reified form, a critique of capitalism insofar as the features that characterize the Jews. As Postone argues: The Jews were rootless, international, and abstract. Modern anti-Semitism, then, is a particularly pernicious fetish form. Its power and danger result from its comprehensive worldview which explains and gives form to certain modes of anti-capitalist discontent in a manner that leaves capitalism intact, by attacking the personifications of that social form. It is truly in this sense “the socialism of fools” according August Bebel. Today, it could be argued, new groups have come to occupy the place once occupied by the Jews. In the case of Trump, as I suggested above, the figure of the Jew is replaced by the Muslim and the Mexican who seems equally “rootless, international and abstract. “ The constitution of neo-liberal subjectivity entails making each individual increasingly responsible for his or her own success or failure. One of the most cutting epithets served up by Trump is “loser.” And this, of course, could be said to increase pressure to lay the blame for one's own success or failure on the presence of members of an alien group. What is ailing the United States then isn’t drastic and deepening social and economic inequality combined with declining investments in infrastructure and schools, etc., rather it has to do with “weakness,” a lack of resolve and decision, the index of which is the porosity of borders and the movement of peoples beyond them. 16 Gandesha: Draft: do not copy, distribute or quote without author’s written permission