Nazism’s survival and American authoritarian trends falsified the Institute’s decay-of-authority premise.

Evidence

Soon after the completion of Studies on Authority and the Family, which was to have been merely an interim report, a phase of doubt and indecision or of reorientation, both of the Institute’s academic director and of the Institute dependent on him, seems to have begun. The point of view from which the Institute’s collective research had started was the conviction that authority was in a process of decay, at least in the long term. In the second half of the 1930s, there could be no more doubt about the ability of Nazism to survive, and the undermining of the family and the increasing reduction in unemployment seemed to match perfectly well the requirement that the individual’s character should conform to authoritarian social conditions. Under these conditions, the Institute’s original point of view could not be maintained. At the same time, the Roosevelt period in the USA showed that, even in non-fascist states, authoritarian (or subservient) thinking and behaviour was not decaying, even in the long term, but rather increasing. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 269

Categorization

• XREF: Ties the Institute’s turn to the Studies on Authority and the Family framework and to the later Authoritarian Personality project.
• DEFINE: Clarifies what the Institute’s founding premise actually was: authority in long-term decay.