The Authoritarian Personality and the Problematic Pathologization of Politics

Attempts to apply the methods and findings of The Authoritarian Personality to Chinese culture and politics reveal the limits of its cross-cultural reach. Additional qualms result from a consideration of the history of displacing the rhetoric of pathologization from medicine to psychology to society and finally to politics. Critical Theory’s warning against the subsumption of non-identical individuals under homogenizing categories is only partly answered by the claim that such a homogenization has already taken place in modern society. By labeling those whose politics we may disdain as suffering from personality disorders, we risk undermining any hope for the persuasive use of reason in a deliberative democracy. We also provide an exculpatory excuse for deeds that without being labeled a sign of pathology would be recognized in moral terms as simply evil.