ABSTRACT
This chapter ascertains the possible influence of Cold War attitudes on forty years of authoritarianism research. An extensive review produced an empirical research paradigm that, on one hand, has been contributed to by many investigators but, on the other, has been criticized continually by others. This chapter briefly reviews the history of authoritarianism research, the main objections raised against it, and its general treatment in the social science literature. Reviewing two main objections against F-scale research, namely its validity and the "left-wing authoritarianism issue," it is argued that an empirical structural reductionist bias has been working against adequate follow-up testing of the original theory. According to the Adorno et al. model, the potential supporters of an extreme right-wing political movement can be considered authoritarian and ethnocentric. The present analysis shows that the two most important obstacles that critics raised have either been greatly overstated or can be reinterpreted in terms of Adorno et al. original assumptions about authoritarianism.
