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Adorno, Negative Typologies, and the AJC: THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY and the Emergence of an Anti-Racist Theory of Race, 1945-8

Sun, December 16, 12:30 to 2:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cambridge 1

Abstract

This paper considers the historical origins, philosophy, and sociological methods articulated in the making of the collaboration between the American Jewish Committee and the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. Examining how THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY’S landmark social survey of 1950 drew its methods from an interdisciplinary mixture of sociological, psychological, statistical and psychoanalytical ideas, this paper argues that the anti-racist concept of race was born out of a theory of negative modeling. The writers of THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY are famous for combining Marx and Freud. But the question of how to incorporate Weber’s ideal type methodology in the realm of cultural and interethnic politics loomed just as large, not least because their social survey had a terrifying predecessor in E. R. Jaensch’s 1938 DER GEGENTYPUS (THE ANTITYPE). Jaensch, who was an enthusiastic Nazi and a member of Rosenberg’s KAMPFBUND FÜR DEUTSCHE KULTUR, developed a statistical method for identifying what he called the “S-type” of individual. Nominally, this stood for those individuals who engaged in the “synaesthetic” style of debate, but Jaensch’s open Antisemitism signalled its true target: the “Semitic type.” His goal was to root out those putatively Nietzschean slave moralists of Semitic origin who undermined the action-oriented leadership of Aryan culture. Working from archival and published documents that show how Adorno worked to deploy Freudian notions of psychoanalysis against Jaensch to turn his sociometrics into a way of measuring Antisemitic rigidity in thought, this paper investigates how the Frankfurt School theorists transformed the 1930s approach to racial typology into an explicitly anti-racist theory of reflection and political legitimacy. This paper further shows how the study of Antisemitism as an element of global racism opened up, for social scientists in the Frankfurt School, new possibilities of identifying and defining objectivity within perspectival and interdisciplinary research.

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