ABSTRACT
There appeared, soon after the Second World War, in 1945 in London, Austrian philosopher Karl Popper's work, The Open Society and Its Enemies. It was immediately and widely celebrated; it was also a kind of natural companion to another book, Horkheimer's and Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality, published in the United States. Both works were written by refugees from German-occupied Europe who were or would have been victims of the official anti-Semitic policies. Authority is thus the cement that keeps people together and is the factor allowing them to rely on each other in the vast give-and-take of social, material, and cultural transactions. The most important attempt in history to transform the family into something else, as yet with an unclear identity. Subsequently, with the family perhaps decisively modified and loosened, other institutions have become easy targets, with unsuspected consequences.
