The authoritarian personality

Alan Wolfe seems to think that the conclusions of The Authoritarian Personality were arrived at 55 years too late.

Before anyone was talking about the radical right in America -- the John Birch Society, the most notorious of the new conservative groups to develop in the postwar period, wasn't founded until 1958 -- The Authoritarian Personality seemed to anticipate the fervent crusades against communism and the attacks on Chief Justice Earl Warren, the United Nations, and even fluoridation that would characterize postwar politics in the United States. The fact that the radical right has transformed itself from a marginal movement to an influential sector of the contemporary Republican Party makes the book's choice of subject matter all the more prescient.

Finally, the book was filled with data, including its famous "F scale." Based on how respondents answered a series of questions, the F scale identified nine key dimensions of a protofascist personality: conventionality, submissiveness, aggression, subjectivity, superstitiousness, toughness, cynicism, the tendency to project unconscious emotional responses onto the world, and heightened concerns about sex.

For example, subjects were asked how much they disagreed or agreed with such statements as:

"Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn." (Submissiveness.)

"Homosexuality is a particularly rotten form of delinquency and ought to be severely punished." (Aggression and sex.)

"No insult to our honor should ever go unpunished." (Toughness and aggression.)

"No matter how they act on the surface, men are interested in women for only one reason." (Sex and cynicism.)

The F scale was only one of the research methods featured in The Authoritarian Personality. The authors also measured ethnocentrism; administered Thematic Appreciation Tests, presenting subjects with pictures and asking them to tell a story about them; and relied upon clinical interviews resembling psychoanalytic sessions. Rarely, if ever, have social scientists probed ordinary human beings in as much detail as did the book's authors.

Indeed, participating in this study was so demanding for subjects that the authors made no effort to engage in random sampling. They first tried their methods out on college students, the usual captive audience, before getting the cooperation of the leaders of various organizations to survey their groups -- unions, the merchant marine, employment-service veterans, prison inmates, psychology-clinic patients, and PTA's.

But Wolfe concludes that the study, ridiculed and driven to obscurity by its poor study design, looked at the wrong group to look for insipient fascists. Namely college students. He seems unaware of these people.