The Authoritarian Personality and the Production of Alienation: The Dialectic of Freedom, Authority, and the Self in the Thought of Erich Fromm and the Frankfurt School

Abstract

This study examines the authoritarian personality as a problem concerning the relation of the human subject to freedom, autonomy, reason, and domination, rather than merely as a set of psychological traits open to measurement, It asks how freedom may cease to be an exercise of self-determination and become a burden from which the individual seeks relief through submission to an external power, The analysis develops this question through Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W, Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, Fromm’s account of escape from freedom shows authoritarianism as a failure of autonomous selfhood; Horkheimer and Adorno reveal how reason can become instrumental when it is reduced to efficiency and control without critical reflection on ends; and Marcuse explains how technological rationality, administered needs, and social integration can produce a one-dimensional form of subjectivity in which domination is experienced as normality, The empirical project of The Authoritarian Personality is therefore treated as an important but secondary moment within a broader critical problem: why the subject may consent to conditions that diminish its own autonomy, The study argues that authoritarianism and alienation form a circular relation: alienation weakens self-directed agency and creates a demand for externally supplied certainty, while submission deepens alienation by replacing autonomous judgment with dependence, Emancipation consequently requires more than the removal of direct coercion; it requires the recovery of critical reason, positive freedom, and the capacity to question socially produced needs, identities, and forms of obedience.