Adorno

Adorno’s Years in California 297

typology which made it possible to understand the authoritarian per-

sonality more precisely. By comparing individual cases, he drew up a

list of six types, although they had no more than descriptive value:

Surface Resentment can easily be recognized in terms of justified

or unjustified social anxieties.... With the Conventional pattern...

acceptance of conventional values is outstanding. The superego

was never firmly established and the individual is largely under

the sway of its external representatives. The most obvious under-

lying motive is the fear of ‘being different’. The Authoritarian

type is governed by the superego and has continuously to contend

with strong and highly ambivalent id tendencies. He is driven

by the fear of being weak. In the Tough Guy the repressed id

tendencies gain the upper hand, but in a stunted and destructive

form. Both the Crank and the Manipulative types seem to have

resolved the Oedipus Complex through a narcissistic withdrawal

into their inner selves.^111

Adorno had not only created a typology for the group of people who
according to the F Scale had an affinity with authoritarianism. He also
produced one for people who are free of prejudice, those who emerged
from the tests with low scores. He distinguished here between five types:
the Rigid low scorers who compulsively cling not to paternal authority,
but to socially recognized collectivities; the Protesting low scorers whose
sublimated hatred of the father idea leads them to become the enemies
of every authority; the Impulsive low scorers who are threatened by
overpowering libidinous energy; the Easy-Going low scorers who have
sublimated their id into feelings of compassion; and the Genuine Liberals
who are able to balance the divergent claims of ego, super-ego and id.^112
This last type was exemplary in Adorno’s view. He contrasted it with
the Manipulative type in the group of the prejudiced. Such a person is
over-realistic, fixated on self-preservation, and treats everything and
everyone as an object to be handled, manipulated. ‘The technical aspects
of life, and things qua tools, are fraught with libido. The emphasis is
on “doing things”, with far-reaching indifference towards the content of
what is going to be done.’^113
Adorno knew that the Berkeley study was by no means free of the
affliction of every empirical sociology: the need to choose ‘between the
reliability and the profundity of its findings’.^114 Against the background
of this dilemma, he summarized the achievement of the study: ‘If The
Authoritarian Personality made a contribution, then it is not to be found
in the absolute conclusiveness of its positive insights, let alone in its
measurements, but above all in the conception of the problem, which is
marked by an essential interest in society and is related to a theory that
had not previously been translated into quantitative investigations of
this kind.’^115