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IN SEPTEMBER 2015, THE VETERAN RADICAL MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT Jeremy Corbyn defeated three other mainstream candidates to be elected leader of the UK Labour Party. He won over 250 thousand votes from members, registered supporters, and affiliated union members, 59 percent of the total. Corbyn was backed by most major unions, including Unite, the CWU, ASLEF, and UNISON. During the first few months of Corbyn’s leadership, he enjoyed an uneasy peace with the 230 or so members of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP, the collective organization of Labour’s members of the House of Commons), the vast majority of whom had little confidence in his leadership. [Read More]

THE SHORT ARTICLE “WHY NOT TRUMP?” by Chris Cutrone in Platypus Review #891 is both brilliant and deeply flawed. It is brilliant in its provocative polemic, starting with the title, forcing us to engage with the question in a fresh way. This undeniably is what Cutrone intended, a challenge starting with and finally culminating in “the obvious question that is avoided but must be asked by anyone not too frightened to think. [Read More]

FROM WHICH PSYCHOLOGICAL PRECONDITIONS is it possible to come to a “rational” view of society – a society which, in its current mode of rationality, is arguably less than 200 years old? If such a view is putatively or provisionally achieved, to what extent are contributing psychogenetic factors overcome and left behind, and to what extent do they remain latent or dormant? These are theoretical questions that underlie The Authoritarian Personality study, which, according to the final words of Adorno’s “Remarks on the Authoritarian Personality” (published here for the first time), seeks to study modern society from the “receiver’s end. [Read More]

A. The Place of the Study in today’s Research In order to bring into relief the purpose and scope of the study it seems appropriate to denote its relation to other current research into prejudice. We shall try to achieve this through an examination of the specific differences between our work and that of others. To be sure, these differences are partly due to extraneous and more or less accidental circumstances such as the set-up out of which the study grew, the composition of the senior staff who was particularly interested in the socio-psychological aspects of the project, and others. [Read More]

WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO CLAIM that a person, social group, or historical moment is authoritarian by varying degrees? In what way can the emergence of modern authoritarianism be accounted for and how would it be overcome? These were central questions in the landmark 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality (AP), coauthored by T.W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford.1 AP emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War, a time when finding answers to the rise of fascism was a desideratum for intellectuals and political figures. [Read More]

Immanent critique WHENEVER APPROACHING ANY PHENOMENON, Adorno’s procedure is one of immanent dialectical critique. The phenomenon is treated as not accidental or arbitrary but as a necessary form of appearance that points beyond itself, indicating conditions of possibility for change. It is a phenomenon of the necessity for change. The conditions of possibility for change indicated by the phenomenon in question are explored immanently, from within. The possibility for change is indicated by a phenomenon’s self-contradictions, which unfold from within itself, from its own movement, and develop from within its historical moment. [Read More]