The Authoritarian Personality

First published: in Deutsche

Universittszeitung, Band 12 (Nr. 9, 1957), pp. 34;
Translated: by Florian Nadge;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute &
ShareAlike) marxists.org 2011.

What
do
we
mean
by
authoritarian
personality? We usually see a clear difference
between the individual who wants to rule, control,
or restrain others and the individual who tends to
submit, obey, or to be humiliated. To use a
somewhat friendlier term, we might talk of the
leader and his followers. As natural as the
difference between the ruling and the ruled might
in many ways be, we also have to admit that
these two types, or as we can also say, these two
forms of authoritarian personality are actually
tightly bound together.
What they have in common, what defines the
essence of the authoritarian personality is an
inability: the inability to rely on ones self, to be
independent, to put it in other words: to endure
freedom.
The opposite of the authoritarian character is
the mature person: a person who does not need
to cling to others because he actively embraces
and grasps the world, the people, and the things
around him. What does that mean? Children still
need to cling. In their mothers womb they are
in a physical sense one with their mother. After
birth, for several months and in many ways even
for years, they remain in a psychological sense
still a part of their mother. Children could not
exist without the mothers help. However, they
grow and develop. They learn to walk, to talk, and
find their way around the world which becomes
their world. Children possess two skills, inherent
to the individual, which they can develop: love
and reason.
Love is the bond and the feeling of being one
with the world while keeping ones own
independence and integrity. The loving individual
is connected with the world. He is not frightened
since the world is his home. He can lose himself
because he is certain of himself.
Love means recognizing the world as an
emotional experience. However, there is also

another way of recognizing, understanding with

the mind. We call this kind of understanding
reason. It is different from Intelligence.
Intelligence is using the mind to reach certain
practical goals. A chimpanzee demonstrates
intelligence when he sees a banana in front of his
cage but cannot reach it with either one of the
two sticks in his cage, then he joins both sticks
and gets the banana. This is the intelligence of
the animal, which is the same manipulating
intelligence that we usually call understanding
when talking of people. Reason is something else.
Reason is the activity of the mind which attempts
to get through the surface to reach the core of
things, to grasp what really lies behind these
things, what the forces and drives are that
themselves invisible operate and determine
the manifestations.
I have given this description of the mature, i.e.
the loving and reasoning individual to better
define the essence of the authoritarian
personality. The authoritarian character has not
reached maturity; he can neither love nor make
use of reason. As a result, he is extremely alone
which means that he is gripped by a deeply
rooted fear. He needs to feel a bond, which
requires neither love nor reason and he finds it
in the symbiotic relationship, in feeling-one with
others; not by reserving his own identity, but
rather by fusing, by destroying his own identity.
The authoritarian character needs another person
to fuse with because he cannot endure his own
aloneness and fear.
But here we reach the boundaries of what both
forms of the authoritarian character the ruling
and the ruled have in common.
The passive-authoritarian, or in other words,
the masochistic and submissive character aims
at least subconsciously to become a part of a
larger unit, a pendant, a particle, at least a small
one, of this great person, this great
institution, or this great idea. The person,
institution, or idea may actually be significant,
powerful, or just incredibly inflated by the
individual believing in them. What is necessary, is
that in a subjective manner the individual is
convinced that his leader, party, state, or idea
is all-powerful and supreme, that he himself is
strong and great, that he is a part of something
greater. The paradox of this passive form of the
authoritarian character is: the individual belittles
himself so that he can as part of something
greater become great himself. The individual
wants to receive commands, so that he does not

have the necessity to make decisions and carry

responsibility. This masochistic individual looking
for dependency is in his depth frightened -often
only subconsciously a feeling of inferiority,
powerlessness, aloneness. Because of this, he is
looking for the leader, the great power, to feel
safe and protected through participation and to
overcome his own inferiority. Subconsciously, he
feels his own powerlessness and needs the leader
to control this feeling. This masochistic and
submissive individual, who fears freedom and
escapes into idolatry, is the person on which the
authoritarian systems Nazism and Stalinism
rest.
More difficult than understanding the passiveauthoritarian,
masochistic
character
is
understanding the active-authoritarian, the
sadistic character. To his followers he seems selfconfident and powerful but yet he is as frightened
and alone as the masochistic character. While the
masochist feels strong because he is a small part
of something greater, the sadist feels strong
because he has incorporated others if possible
many others; he has devoured them, so to speak.
The sadistic-authoritarian character is as
dependent on the ruled as the masochistic
-authoritarian character on the ruler. However the
image is misleading. As long as he holds power,
the leader appears to himself and to others
strong and powerful. His powerlessness becomes
only apparent when he has lost his power, when
he can no longer devour others, when he is on his
own.
When I speak of sadism as the active side of
the authoritarian personality, many people may
be surprised because sadism is usually
understood as the tendency to torment and to
cause pain. But actually, this is not the point of
sadism. The different forms of sadism which we
can observe have their root in a striving, which is
to master and control another individual, to make
him a helpless object of ones will, to become his
ruler, to dispose over him as one sees fit and
without limitations. Humiliation and enslavement
are just means to this purpose, and the most
radical means to this is to make him suffer; as
there is no greater power over a person than to
make him suffer, to force him to endure pains
without resistance.
The fact that both forms of the authoritarian
personality can be traced back to one final
common point the symbiotic tendency
demonstrates why one can find both the sadistic
and masochistic component in so many

authoritarian personalities. Usually, only the

objects differ. We all have heard of the family
tyrant, who treats his wife and children in an
sadistic manner but when he faces his superior in
the office he becomes the submissive employee.
Or to name a better known example: Hitler. He
was driven by the desire to rule all, the German
nation and finally the world, to make them
powerless objects of his will. And still, this same
man was extremely dependent; dependent on the
masses applause, on his advisers approval, and
on what he called the higher power of nature,
history, and fate. He employed pseudo-religious
formulations to express these ideas when for
example he said: the heaven stands above the
nation, as one can fortunately mislead man, but
not heaven. However, the power that impressed
Hitler more than history, god, or fate was nature.
Contrary to the tendency of the last four hundred
years to dominate nature, Hitler insisted that one
can and should dominate man but never nature.
In him, we find this characteristic mixture of
sadistic and masochistic tendencies of an
authoritarian personality: the nature is the great
power which we have to submit to, but the living
being is there to be dominated by us.
However, we can hardly close the topic of the
authoritarian personality without talking about a
problem
that
is
cause
for
a
lot
of
misunderstandings. When recognition of authority
is masochism and its practice sadism, does that
mean that all authority contains something
pathological? This question fails to make a very
significant distinction between rational and
irrational authority. Rational authority is the
recognition of authority based on critical
evaluation of competences. When a student
recognizes the teachers authority to know more
than him, then this a reasonable evaluation of his
competence. The same is the case, when I as the
passenger of a ship recognize the authority of the
captain to make the right and necessary
decisions if in danger. Rational authority is not
based on excluding my reason and critique but
rather assumes it as a prerequisite. This does not
make me small and the authority great but allows
authority to be superior where and as long it
possesses competence.
Irrational authority is different. It is based on
emotional submission of my person to another
person: I believe in him being right, not because
he is, objectively speaking, competent nor
because I rationally recognize his competence. In
the bonds to the irrational authority, there exists
a masochistic submission by making myself small

and the authority great. I have to make it great,

so that I can as one of its particles can also
become great. The rational authority tends to
negate itself, because the more I understand the
smaller the distance to the authority becomes.
The irrational authority tends to deepen and to
prolong itself. The longer and the more
dependent I am the weaker I will become and the
more I will need to cling to the irrational authority
and submit.
All the great dictatorial movements of our
times were (and are) based on irrational
authority. Its driving forces were the submissive
individuals feeling of powerlessness, fear, and
admiration for the leader. All the great and
fruitful cultures are founded on the existence of
rational authority: on people, who are able to

muster the given functions intellectually and

socially and have therefore no need to appeal to
irrational desires.
But I do not want to close without emphasizing
that the individuals goal must be to become his
own authority; i.e. to have a consciousness in
moral issues, conviction in questions of intellect,
and fidelity in emotional matters. However, the
individual can only have such an inner authority if
he has matured enough to understand the world
with reason and love. The development of these
characteristics is the basis for ones own
authority and therefore the basis for political
democracy.