Frankfurt School critical theory is perhaps the most significant theory of society to have developed directly from a research programme focused on the critique of political authoritarianism, as it manifested during the interwar decades of the 20th century. The Frankfurt School’s analysis of the persistent roots – and therefore the perennial nature – of what it describes as the ‘authoritarian personality’ remains influential in the analysis of authoritarian populism in the contemporary world, as evidenced by several recent studies. Yet the tendency in these studies is to reference the final formulation of the category, as expressed in Theodor Adorno and co-thinkers’ The Authoritarian Personality (1950), as if this were a theoretical readymade that can be unproblematically inserted into a measured assessment of the threat to democracy posed by current authoritarian trends. It is high time that the theoretical commitments and political stakes in the category of the authoritarian personality are re-evaluated, in light of the evolution of the Frankfurt School. In this paper, I review the classical theories of the authoritarian personality, arguing that two quite different versions of the theory – one characterological, the other psychodynamic – can be extracted from Frankfurt School research.

法兰克福学派的批判理论也许是直接从针对政治威权主义批评的研究计划直接发展起来的最重要的社会理论，正如它在20世纪两次世界大战期间所表现出来的那样。法兰克福学派对它所描述的“威权人格”的根源以及由此而来的常年性质的分析，对当代世界的威权民粹主义的分析仍然具有影响力，最近的一些研究证明了这一点。然而，这些研究的趋势是参考该类别的最终表述，如西奥多·阿多尔诺（Theodor Adorno）和共同思想者的权威主义人格主义（1950年），就好像这是一种理论上现成的东西，可以毫无问题地插入到对当前威权主义趋势对民主的威胁进行的有针对性的评估中。根据法兰克福学派的发展，现在是时候重新评估在威权人格范畴内的理论承诺和政治利益了。在本文中，我回顾了威权主义人格的经典理论，认为可以从法兰克福学派的研究中提取该理论的两种截然不同的版本-一种是特征学的，另一种是心理动力学的。