Research: Authoritarian freedom: psychopolitics and capitalist accumulation from the Frankfurt School to contemporary critical theory
With reference to the resurgence of authoritarian and illiberal tendencies in contemporary liberal democratic societies, critical theory argues that authoritarianism ‘does not mark a radical break with mass democracy, but rather emerges as an intensification of its internal pathologies’. In the light of this connection, the present research intends to deepen and develop the analyses on the topic of authoritarianism elaborated within the Frankfurt School tradition through the lens of the concept of ‘authoritarian freedom’, used by Wendy Brown to describe a freedom understood as ‘a right to aggression against social justice and to reject democratic principles’.
Through a genealogical reconstruction, the research thus aims to reconstruct the origin of the concept of ‘authoritarian freedom’ in the Frankfurt debate on the ‘authoritarian character’, starting from the social psychology studies promoted by Erich Fromm from 1929 and the Studies on Authority and the Family directed by Max Horkheimer, to the research conducted by Theodor W. Adorno at the University of Berkeley on the authoritarian personality and the work of Herbert Marcuse.
Subsequently, the aim is to study how their work has been taken up by contemporary political theory, studying the differences between an anti-democratic, anti-social and narcissistic conception of freedom, referred to as ‘authoritarian freedom’ (Wendy Brown), ‘fascist freedom’ (Alberto Toscano) or ‘offended freedom’ (Carolin Amlinger, Oliver Nachtwey), and the negative freedom of modern political theory (market freedom, to own or from the authority). The research thus aims to investigate the hypothesis in the contemporary political debate that the perception of a loss of ownership privileges and processes of capitalist dispossession
fuel in some social groups the desire to restore their domination by claiming a ‘distorted’ and ‘pathological’ conception of freedom.