Editing Theodor W. Adorno (section)

====Essays on fascism====
Starting with his 1947 essay ''Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler'',<ref>Adorno, T. (1947). Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler. The Kenyon Review, 9(1), 155-162.</ref> Adorno produced a series of influential works to describe psychological fascist traits. One of these works was ''[[The Authoritarian Personality]]'' (1950),<ref>Adorno, [http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/frankfurt/ap/politics.pdf ''Politics and Economics in the Interview Material''] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304101431/http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/frankfurt/ap/politics.pdf |date=4 March 2016 }}, ch.17</ref> published as a contribution to the ''Studies in Prejudice'' performed by multiple research institutes in the US, and consisting of '[[qualitative research|qualitative interpretation]]s' that uncovered the [[authoritarianism|authoritarian]] character of test persons through indirect questions.<ref name=":0" /> The books have had a major influence on sociology and remain highly discussed and debated. In 1951 he continued on the topic with his essay ''Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda'', in which he said that "Psychological dispositions do not actually cause fascism; rather, fascism defines a psychological area which can be successfully exploited by the forces which promote it for entirely non-psychological reasons of self-interest."<ref>Hammer, Espen (2006) [https://books.google.com/books?id=X3L5R3kiOh4C&pg=PA56 ''Adorno and the political''], pp.56–7</ref>

In 1952 Adorno participated in a group experiment, revealing residual National Socialist attitudes among the recently democratized Germans. He then published two influential essays, ''The Meaning of Working Through the Past'' (1959) and ''Education after Auschwitz'' (1966), in which he argued on the survival of the uneradicated [[National Socialism]] in the [[mindset]]s and institutions of the post-1945 Germany, and that there is still a real risk that it could rise again.<ref>Hammer (2006) p.69</ref> Later on, however, [[Jean Améry]]—who had been tortured at Auschwitz—would sharply object that Adorno, rather than addressing such political concerns, was exploiting Auschwitz for his metaphysical phantom "absolute negativity" ("absolute Negativität"), using a language intoxicated by itself ("von sich selber bis zur Selbstblendung entzückte Sprache").<ref>Andreas Dorschel, 'Der Geist ist stets gestört', in: ''[[Süddeutsche Zeitung]]'' nr. 129 (7 June 2004), p. 14.</ref>