The Spectre of “Left Fascism”: Adorno’s “Authoritarian Personality” Reconsidered
Samir Gandesha
The rise of right-wing populism around the globe, but particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe, has occasioned a return to the concept of the “Authoritarian Personality” as set forth in the eponymous study publish in 1950 by Adorno et al. As I have argued in an article published in recently in the journal Constellations, in order for such a concept to be of value to us today in the context of a neo-liberal, as opposed to a Keynesian order, it needs to be critically evaluated. One of the key early criticisms of the concept was that it focused exclusively on right-wing authoritarianism while over-looking a corresponding authoritarianism of the Left. Today, it is scarcely possible to understand the rise of the Alt-right in the U.S., for example, without understanding the rise of an increasingly authoritarian “identity politics.” This paper will argue that it is possible to suggest that, in his exchange of letters with Herbert Marcuse in 1969 over Habermas’s claim that the certain aspects of the West German SDS evinced a form of “Left Fascism,” Adorno does address an “authoritarianism of the Left.” Deepening the Ferenczian connection to Adorno’s work, I suggest that such a form of authoritarianism can be understood in terms of the problem of the “identification with the aggressor.” If right authoritarianism emphasizes the vertical axis of identification with the leader, then left authoritarianism emphasizes an identification with an “imagined community” grounded in common experiences to which individuals are required to subordinate themselves.
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