The Ambivalent Worker: Max Weber, Critical Theory and the Antinomies of Authority

It is seldom noticed that the concept of the authoritarian personality sprang from research - above all by Max Weber and Erich Fromm - on the ambivalence of the German working class. Unlike earlier social critics and theorists, Weber and Fromm did not simply assume that workers are naturally anti-authoritarian: nor, unlike many later theorists, did they assume the reverse. The working class, they found, is complex divided - indeed, contradictory. Some workers are anti-authoritarian, others worship authority, and many others have deeply mixed feelings. Hence the inadequacy of what Weber called a priori class theories, which, without evidence, deduce consciousness from status, thus finding whatever they presuppose. The alternative, a la Fromm's Critical Theory, is to probe not only the antipodes on the continuum from authoritarianism to anti-authoritarianism, but also the contradictory cases in between. Only in this way can the genuinely contradictory character of class feeling and thinking be understood