The Authoritarian Personality

By T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel ]. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford.

At this moment in world history anti-Semitism is not manifesting itself with the full and violent destructiveness of which we know it to be capable. Even a social disease has its periods of quiescence during which the social scientists, like the biologist or the physician, can study it in the search for more effective ways to prevent or reduce the virulence of the next outbreak.

Today the world scarcely remembers the mechanized persecution and extermination of millions of human beings only a short span of years away in what was once regarded as the citadel of Western civilization. Yet the con­ science of many men was aroused. How could it be, they asked each other, that in a culture of law, order, and reason, there should have survived the irrational remnants of ancient racial and religious hatreds? (From the Foreword).

American Jewish Committee. Pub. III. 1950. 989p.