The Authoritarians
Overview
The Authoritarians is a book written by retiring University of Manitoba professor Bob Altemeyer and published solely online in PDF format, available for free download. (The PDFs are compatible with KGhostView and KPDF, although the footnote links did not work in KGhostView.)
Terminology
The book is about what it calls "Right Wing Authoritarianism", or "RWA" for short; individuals and groups exhibit varying degrees of this as a personality trait, and are correspondingly referred to as "high-RWA" or "low-RWA" where they have unusually high or low levels of it. Chapter 1 explains the reason for the word "Right" in relation to the "high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in their society" exhibited by authoritarian followers:
| Chapter 1 of The Authoritarians says: |
|
Because the submission occurs to traditional authority, I call these followers right-wing authoritarians. I'm using the word "right" in one of its earliest meanings, for in Old English "riht"(pronounced "writ") as an adjective meant lawful, proper, correct, doing what the authorities said. In North America people who submit to the established authorities to extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives, so you can call them "right-wingers" both in my new-fangled psychological sense and in the usual political sense as well. But someone who lived in a country long ruled by Communists and who ardently supported the Communist Party would also be one of my psychological right-wing authoritarians even though we would also say he was a political left-winger. So a right-wing authoritarian follower doesn’t necessarily have conservative political views. Instead he's someone who readily submits to the established authorities in society, attacks others in their name, and is highly conventional. It's an aspect of his personality, not a description of his politics. Right-wing authoritarianism is a personality trait, like being characteristically bashful or happy or grumpy or dopey. |
This explanation seems to imply that the "R" in "RWA" is not to be taken as applying specifically to the political right wing. Dr. Altemeyer later elaborated about this question on Google groups seems to be saying, in essence, that although the phenomenon is not confined to the political right, the experiments he did and the data he gathered were specifically addressing the political right. The "Right [Wing]" was therefore included in the term in order to be as unassuming as possible in giving a label to that which was measured.
To give another example: One might do experiments using water from Lake Huron and describe the results as "the properties of water", but it would probably be more accurate to say they were "the properties of water from Lake Huron". The book similarly describes the properties of "Right Wing Authoritarians", although it may turn out that the results are generalizable in many ways to Authoritarians of other stripes.
Issuepedia policy
Issuepedia will be going on the "reasonably sound opinion" assumption that the various hunches and deductions about the wider nature of authoritarianism are correct until such time as someone argues otherwise – though contributors should be aware of situations in which political orientation is a factor, and clarify this in their writing if necessary. --Woozle 13:41, 27 March 2007 (EDT)
Chapters
- Who Are the Authoritarian Followers?
- The Roots of Authoritarian Aggression, and Authoritarianism Itself
- How Authoritarian Followers Think
- Authoritarian Followers and Religious Fundamentalism
- Authoritarian Leaders
- Authoritarianism and Politics
- What's To Be Done?
Links
Reference
- official web site
- Google search: [1]
Commentary
Notes
Questions for follow-up studies
- Is there a correlation between "RWA" level and...
- ...interest in spectator sports?
- ...friendships? (do high-RWAs and low-RWAs get along?)
- ...creativity? artistic talent?
Some examples of "left-wing" authoritarianism are raised here.