Libertarians and the Authoritarian Personality

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    Libertarians and theAuthoritarian personalityby J . J . Ray

    School of Sociology, University of New S outh Wales, AustraliaLike the United States, Australia has a libertarian political party. As in theUnited States it is plagued with dissension and gets very few votes. Oncecalled the Workers party, it is now called the Progress party. Upon itsformation it was immediately identified by the press and much of thecom munity a s right-wing a nd indeed "fascist". Party m embers an d evenlibertarians who are not party members are also commonly so described.Similar experiences could be related from other parts of the world.Libe rtarian s themselves find it a strange experience to be labelled with thevery thing they ar e devoted to opposing, but the ascription is nonetheless ahard one to dislodge. It stems of course from the habit of seeing all parties asfitting neatly a lon g a single left-right con tinuum . Since an y party's econ om icpolicies are a very salient part of its image and since free market policies ingeneral tend to he associated with the political Right, the finding thatlibertarians advocate extreme m arket freedom seems to justify a n assump-tion that they are extremely right-wing.In these circumstances, any proof that libertarians can offer to show thatlibertarianism is no t right-wing m ust be seen as very welcome. There is in thesocial science literature a very large body of such proof. This paper willreview som e of it. A reason w hy the proof might not be well-known to manylibertarians is that it goes under the label of the anton ym to libertarianism-"authoritarianism".What the literature shows, then, is that it is authoritarianism-notlibertarianism-which is characteristically "right-wing." Advocates of indi-vidual liberty tend, on the whole, to be "left-wing."The literature s tarts out with the now-famous b ook by Ado rno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson an d Sanford , The Authoritarian Personality. This boo khad its genesis in a n a ttem pt by these four Jewish scholar s to explain the riseof German Nazism. M ost of the research reported in the book, however, wasdone in California.These au th or s constructed a "scale" (list) of auth ori tar ian attitude s whichthey administered to a wide variety of population samples. They found that

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    40 TH E J O U R N A L OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES Winter

    those who "scored high" on this scale (endorsed most items on the list)tended to be sympathetic to the political Right and in fact showed "pre-fascist" personalities. Love of au tho rity was fascist, not love of liberty. Thebook also showed tha t au thori tarian personalities were in important senses"pathological". Oppone nts of liberty were psychologically inadequate o reven "sick".Welcome thou gh these findings may so und to libertarians, they were soonchallenged. A follow-up hoo k by Christie an d J ah od a challenged the Cali-fornia findings on both methodological and substantive grounds.? Methodo-logically, the point was raised that Adorno er al. had included in their list ofattitud es only pro-authority items. There were no actua l pro-liberty items.One could only express pro-liberty attitudes by rejecting pro-authoritystatements. Since many people are rath er careless in saying "Yes" to ques-tionn aire items, o ne could never be sure whether a "Yes" response repre-sented genuine agreement or careless agreement. A high scorer could beeither simply agreeable or a genuine authoritarian; in such circumstances,one could never be sure whether it was acquiescence which was correlatingwith right-wing attitudes or whether it was genuine authoritarianism.The substantive point raised against the California studies was that theywere simply obviously false. Right-wingers such as Nazis and Fascists maybe authoritarians but equally so are Communists such as Mao and Stalin.Authoritarianism was to be foun d no t a t one end of the political spectrumbut rather at both ends. This would make libertarians the paragons ofmoderation and compromise. Libertarians, however, are not moderate orcompromising in their love for liberty. They are indeed extremists in thatrespect a s judged by general com mu nity standards.A new proposal that substantially helped to resolve this dilemma was along overdue reconceptualization of political allegiance along two dimen-sions rather than one. This reconceptualization was associated with the

    names of Ro keac h an d Eysenck.3 They rightly identified authorita rianism -libertarianism as being a t right angles to (unrelated to) the norma l radical-conservative dimension of politics. Both authors, however, had proposalsfor re-naming the authoritarianism-libertarianism dimension. Rokeachwanted to call it op en- an d closed-mindedness and Eysenck wanted t o call ittough-tender-mindedness.However the tw o dimensions were labelled, the new schema m ade a lot ofsense. Com mu nists and Fascists could be shown t o fall at opposite ends ofthe first dimension (radicalism-conservatism) but a t the same end (authori-tarian) of the second dimension. Democrats and Republicans on the otherhand could he shown to fall also on opposite sides of the radicalism-conservatism divide but in the same position on the authoritarianism-libertarianism dimension (half-way between the two). European Liberalsand libertarians would fall in the middle on the left-right dimension but

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    1980 THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALlTY 41tow ards the libertarian end of the second dimension (with libertarians in factat the extreme end of the libertarian dimension).

    Neat as this schema was, however, there proved to be a great deal ofdifficulty in showing that people's individual attitude s could in fact beordered in accordance with it. A particularly crushing attack was directedagain st Eysenck's theory by Christie an d by Rok each an d Hanley on thegrou nds t ha t Eysenck had failed t o find a single attitud e statement tha t waspurely "tough-minded" (with out being a t the sam e time either right- o r left-wing).4Rokeach later had better success in this respect but follow-up work byother researchers tended to show that there was always at least a slighttendency for his "closed-minded" (auth oritaria n) statements t o be morecharacteristic of the political Right.5Rokeach's scale (the " D scale) also shared with the Adorno et at. "F'scale, the problem of one-way wording. Again there were no explicitlylibertarian items.Three attempts to remedy this problem were made by Ray using Austra-lian data.6 Three new scales were constructed wherein there were equalnumbe rs of auth oritaria n and libertarian items. O n each occasion, therewere stron g negative correlations between the two sorts of items and o n eachoccasion the total scores on the scales showed strong correlations withpolitical conservatism as measured both by voting preference and by otherscales expressing conservative attitudes on particular social and politicalquestions. The beauty of scales with a n equal balance between the tw o sortsof items is that to get a m axim um score a person has to say "Yes" t o half thequestio ns an d "No" to the other half. People who just say "Yes" to every-thing thus get a low score on half the items and a high score on the otherhalf. The overall score for them is right in the middle where they belong-not at one end as artificially high scorers. The results obtained with balancedscales are then much more trustworthy than results from one-way-wordedscales.Thus, at this point, although we have seen that there are theoreticalinadequacies in a onedimensional description of political options andalthough there have been methodological inadequacies in much of theresearch in the area, the overall conclusion when all these are taken intoaccount is $till the same as that originally drawn by Adorno et a1.-it isauthoritarians, not libertarians, who tend to be politically right-wing andfascist.In fact Ray (1973) showed that bo th by the mechanical/statistical proce-dures of factor analysis and by the criteria of various historical definitions,the Adorno et a/. "F'scale was indistinguishable from a measure of conser-vatism.'There are two very imp ortan t ways, however, in which the Ado rno et 01.

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    42 THE JOURNAL OF LIBERTARIAN STUDIES Winteraccount has not been shown to be true. First, authoritarians/conservativescan not be shown to be psychologically sick, and, second, authoritarianattitudes can not be shown to go with authoritarian hehaviour.Various m easures of au thoritarianism have repeatedly been fou nd n ot tocorrelate with various measures of maladjustment (including standardclinical indices such as the Eysenck " N scale.8 Examples of such findingscan be found in Ray, Masling, Elms, Richek et aL, Fraccia et al. andGaensslen el al.9 Attributes that authoritarianism has been fo und t o corre-late with (e.g., rigidity, dogmatism) are obviously not always maladaptive.As "stick-to-it-iveness", such attributes might in so me circumstances be, infact, rather admired.lQ

    Th e failure of au tho ritarian attitudes to relate to auth oritar ian behaviouris, however, a more serious failure of the Adorno et al. accoun t. In fact, topsychologists the a ttitude /beh avio ur discrepancy is a familiar pheno men on.It is certainly true in oth er fields such as racism." Explanations for it differ,but it could have its o rigin in the desirability of othe r people's not being ableto guess our motives. Since a motive hidden even from ourselves (Freud's"unconscious motivation") is prob ably th e one best hidden of all, real andconscious motivations of opp osite character m ay be quite com mo n. Sincenot everyone is so devious, however, there ar e also large numbers of peoplewh o d o consciously acknow ledge their real motivations. Overall, then, thereis "orthogonality" between the two. One ca nn ot even guess whether theacknowledged motivation is the real motivation or not. This, however, isonly o ne possible explanation for the pheno men on. O ther effects will surelybe involved also. Th e evidence for the unrelatedness of auth oritar ianjlib er-tarian attitudes and authoritarianllibertarian behaviour has been exten-sively summarized before, so it will not be repeated here.12Since a distinction is necessary between au thor itarian attitudes a nd behav-iour, a very obv ious question becomes: Given that we have seen auth oritar -ian attitudes to be characteristically conservative, is it also true that thosewho behave in a n au thor itarian way are conservative? Th e evidence on thisquestion is no t yet extensive b ut so f ar all available results show no relation-ship between the two whatever.13 People who behave in an authoritarianway are equally likely to be from the Left, the Right or the center.F ro m all the above, then, the conclusion appears to be that a person oflibertarian views is likely to have more in common with the political Leftthan the political Right, but whether in his personal life he will tend tobehave in a liberal/permissive way or in an autho ritarian /direc tive waycannot be predicted.

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    1980 TH E AUTHOR ITARIAN PERSONALITY 43NOTES

    I . T. W. Adorn o. E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D. J. Levinson, and R. N. Sanfo rd, The Aurhorilor-ion Personolity (New York: Harper & Row, 1950).2. R. Christie and M. Jahoda, Sludies in the Scope ond M ethod of "The AuthoritarianPersonaliry" (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press. 1954).3. M. Rokeach, The Open ond Closed M ind (N ew York: Basic Books, 1960); H. J. Eysenck,The Psychology of Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954).4. R. Christie, "Eysenck's Treatment of the Personality of Communists," PsyehologiralBullelin 53 (1956): 41 1-38; M. Rok each and C. Hanley, "Care and Carelessness in Psychol-ogy," Psychologicol Bulletin 53 (1956): 183-86.5. D. J. Hanson, "Dogmatism and Political Ideology," Journal of Humon Relnrions 18(1970): 995-1002.6. J. J. Ray , "An 'Attitude t o Authority' Scale," Ausrralion Psychologist 6 (1971): 31-50;idem.. "Non-Ethnocentric Authoritarianism." Ausrralion and New Zeolond Journal ofSociology 8 (1972): 96-102; and idem. "A New Balanced 'F' Scale-and Its Relation toSocial Class," Ausrrolian Psychologirt 7 (1972): 155-66.7. Ray, "Conservatism, A utho ritarian ism and R elated V ariables: A Review and an Emp iricalStudy," in G. D. Wilson, ed., The Psychology of Conservofisrn (London: Academic Press,1973). chap . 2.8. H. J. Eysenck, The Biological Basis of Personolity (Springfield, Ill.: Thomas, 1967).9. Ray , "Attitude to Authority"; idem., "Militarism, Authoritarianism, Neuroticism and Anti-social Behavior," Journol of Con/lier Resolulion 16 (1972): 31940; M. Masling, "HowNeurotic is the Authoritarian? Journal of Abnormal and Social Psyeho1og.v 49 (1954):316-18; A. C. Elms, "Those Little Old Ladies in Tennis Shoes are No Nuttier Tha n AnyoneElse: It T ur ns Out." Psychology Todoy 3 (1970): 27 8; H. G. Richek, C. D. M ayo, and H. B.Puryear, "Dogmatism, Religiosity and Mental Health in College Students," Mental Hy-giene 54 (1970): 572-74; J. F raccia, G. Sheppard, J. Pintyr, J. Crovella, and S. Merlis,"Personal Adjustment and Authoritarian Attitudes Towa rds the Mentally Ill," Psychologi-cal Reporrs 31 (1972): 483-86; an d H. Ga ensslen , F. May, and F. Woelpert, "RelationBetween Dogmatism and Anxiety," Psychological Reports 33 (1973): 955-58.10. Also see J. J. Ray and J . Martin, "How Desirable is Dogmatism? Ausrrolian ond NewZeolond Journal of Sociologv 10 (1974): 143-44.

    1 1 . See Ray, "Ethnocentrism: Attitudes and Behavior," Ausrrnlion Quarterly43 (1971): 89-97.12. See Ray, "DoAuthoritarians Hold Authoritarian Attitudes? Human Relorions 29 (1976):707-725~.13. Ray, "Does A utho ritaria nism o f Personality G o with Conservatism?" Auslrolian Journa lofPsychology 31 (1979): 9-14.