ABSTRACT
The Leipzig Authoritarianism Studies working group has been surveying political attitudes in Germany since 2002. The series of investigations was prompted by an unprecedented wave of right-wing extremist attacks in unified Germany in the 1990s. The concept of authoritarianism has recently undergone three reductions in the way that it has been perceived and adopted, these reductions having significant implications for the analytical strength of the concept. The Leipzig Authoritarianism Studies attempt to address these deficits by using both a psychoanalytical understanding of subjectivation, and a critical-theoretical understanding of social change. The fact that the cause of the conflict is hidden partly because this expropriation of surplus value also contradicts the ideological self-understanding of bourgeois society as a system that comprises market subjects, equal in rights and acting under free and fair conditions.
