The right-wing weekly Human Events has published its list of the Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Marx’s Communist Manifesto beats out Hitler’s Mein Kampf by a wide margin as the MOST HARMFUL BOOK. Marx is also honored with TWO books in the TOP TEN, with Nietzsche coming in ninth place. The list was compiled by polling a group of "conservative scholars". I was not surprised to see feminist and environmental books on the list, but I was surprised that Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality placed 13th overall.
Adorno collaborated on this study in 1944 to come up with an assessment of personality traits that might predict an attraction to fascism. The underlying theory was that fascist threat to democracy was not limited to Germany , and there existed a class of individuals in the US who were susceptible to fascist propaganda. The following traits indicate the Authoritarian Personality:
| Conventionalism | Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values |
| Authoritarian submission | Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the in-group |
| Authoritarian aggression | Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values |
| Anti-intraception | Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded |
| Superstition and stereotypy | the belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories |
| Power and ‘toughness’ | Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertion of strength and toughness |
| Destructiveness and cynicism | Generalized hostility, vilification of the human |
| Projectivity | The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection of unconscious emotional impulses |
| Sex | Exaggerated concern with sexual ‘goings-on’ |
I do not know if these personality traits are good predictors of fascist tendencies, but they certainly describe the subscriber base of Human Events.
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David
Did you happen to read the list of panel-members used for the development of this list? I don’t know the precise leanings of this panel, but I do note that the majority of them are university professors. You do know that 72% of american university professors describe themselves as liberal, compared to 15% who list themselves as conservative, right? Would it be fair to paint this as a liberal list? Why must you vilify those who happen to have a different point of view?
Kuch – did you happen to notice that only one of the panel-members was a woman (if you count Phylis Shlafley as female) ? No wonder they included the feminist Betty Friedan in the top ten most dangerous. As for villfying those with a different point of view, check out the contributing journalists for Human Events: Anne Coulter (who champions Joseph McCarthy as an American hero), Patrick Buchanan (anti-Semite) and Michelle Malkin (apologist for the WWII Japanese internment camps). These folks make a nice living villifying anyone in the US or Europe who expresses a progressive point of view.
If this list was represenative of the liberal intelligentsia in America, it would include more academics from major institutions. Most academics would be embarrased to be listed in an article condemning “Democracy and Education” as the 5th most evil book of the 20th century. The actual bias of the list is towards a soft clerical fascism.