Late Modernism. Robert Genter

      Reconsidering the Authoritarian Personality in America: The Sociological Challenge of David Riesman

      IN A 1961 revision of an Art News article, “New York Painting Only Yesterday,” Clement Greenberg, reflective and triumphant, proclaimed that “someday it will have to be told how ‘anti-Stalinism,’ which started out more or less as ‘Trotskyism,’ turned into art for art’s sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.”¹ Greenberg’s celebratory comparison between anti-Communism and modernist aesthetics validated Kenneth Burke’s prescient claim that ulterior motives lurked behind the disinterested stance of high modernism. Indeed, besides their heroic attempt to defend the humanities in a world that had succumbed to the tools of instrumental reason, high modernists in the 1940s and 1950s fought a desperate struggle to salvage the individual from the trappings of modern authoritarian movements threatening the foundations of Western civilization. Although never engaging in the reactionary forms of nationalistic display like many of their intellectual compatriots, high modernists such as Lionel Trilling, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Clement Greenberg, and Allen Tate echoed the rhetoric of many anti-Communist organizations. They also offered their theoretical perspectives to analyze not just the tremors of the Cold War landscape but, more important, the historical developments that had led so many of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Atlantic to abnegate their freedom for the illusionary dreams found in mass movements. High modernists joined with American sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists in dissecting the mental condition of those who had joined totalitarian organizations to determine if such ideologies had any widespread appeal in the United States. The result was a sustained investigation into the psyche of the American people, an investigation that supposedly revealed the frightening possibility that recent historical trends—ranging from economic catastrophe to postindustrialization—had given rise to the same pathological mental state that had plunged Europe into turmoil.

      In this sense, the debates over modernist aesthetics that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s were not merely about formalist practices versus spontaneous poetics or disinterested contemplation versus rhetorical persuasion. Modernists of all stripes were swept up into this larger discussion about the threat that totalitarian ideologies posed to the American public. This debate, which was obviously not confined to modernist circles, was in fact about the fate of the self in an age of mass politics and mass culture—about whether or not the scale of political and economic institutions had usurped the critical capacities of the individual and had thereby paved the way for collectivism. Most high modernists answered in the affirmative; other modernists were less convinced. For instance, many romantic modernists such as Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer criticized high modernists for inciting a panic over the so-called authoritarian personality in America, a panic that they argued ironically reinforced the compulsive conformity about which Trilling, Adorno, and others were so worried. Similary, those artists and critics who composed the tradition of late modernism fretted over the almost compulsive anti-Communist stance of most high modernists. For instance, in a paper given to the American Committee for Cultural Freedom in 1951 titled “On the Limits of Totalitarian Power,” sociologist David Riesman expressed reservations about the overreaction on the part of European commentators who, in their effort to warn the Western world about the appeal of mass movements, failed to understand how the complexities of modern society might mitigate against such movements instead of merely producing them. Speaking to an audience that included Hannah Arendt, Bruno Bettelheim, and Nathan Leites, Riesman suggested that such critics had overestimated the “psychological pressure” of totalitarian ideologies, particularly in the United States where such fanaticism had made little advance.² His argument was that liberal organizations such as the Committee for Cultural Freedom had done a much too efficient job of awakening their fellow citizens to the dangerous appeals of authoritarian ideologies, making everyone begin to “greatly overestimate the capacity of totalitarianism to restructure human personality” (415). In his paper, Riesman took to task writers from George Orwell to Aldous Huxley to Theodor Adorno to Hannah Arendt, all of whom falsely assumed that the fragmentation of traditional social life had automatically produced broken personalities.

      In many ways, Riesman offered the most famous discussion of the so-called American character in the 1950s, a discussion that centered on the critical capacities of ordinary citizens to resist the allure of political movements and to challenge the pressures of social conformity. His 1950 best-selling book The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character was just one of many books published by critics that detailed how postwar social and economic changes had unsettled the lives, expectations, and outlooks of most Americans. But unlike high modernists such as Theodor Adorno or Lionel Trilling, who saw nothing but confusion and uncertainty in the eyes of ordinary citizens in an age of mass politics and mass culture, Riesman saw a new American character that, while still beset by many of the same psychological hang-ups as past generations, had developed a more flexible personality structure. This American character possessed the capacity for positive adjustment and mutability, traits that not only helped individuals escape the lure of political movements but also pointed to a more open form of selfhood than that imagined by other critics. According to Riesman, high modernist critics, who held fast to a notion of “psychological integration,” had underestimated “the amount of disintegration and inconsistency of response that an individual can stand” (424). In response, he called for “a more robust view of man’s potentialities, not only for evil, about which we have heard and learned so much, not only for heroism, about which we have also learned, but also for sheer unheroic cussed resistance to totalitarian efforts to make a new man of him” (425). In this sense, debates over modernist aesthetics were also about the nature of identity in modern America. In The Lonely Crowd, Riesman, like other late modernists, offered an entirely different vision of man’s capabilities and capacities for change.

      Discovering the Authoritarian Personality

      In a 1954 Saturday Review article on Allan Valentine’s The Age of Conformity, William Barrett, the associate editor of Partisan Review, argued that Valentine’s indictment of the authoritarian tendencies within American life was “nothing new.” For Barrett, “there could hardly be a subject that has been so thoroughly scoured and picked apart by this time by journalists, sociologists, pundits, and assorted visiting firemen from foreign shores.”³ Indeed, the firemen from abroad to whom Barrett referred helped to shift discussions dramatically within the United States about a general breakdown of Western society. Growing fears about the concentration of power within the United States had of course already appeared in diverse works such as James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution