Postwar political psychology’s environmentalism was a reaction against social Darwinism and fascism

Evidence

A unifying assumption behind this 1940s–1950s interdisciplinary flourishing is that political personality and the behavior of leaders and masses are formed by socialization experiences, especially those emphasized by the environmentalistic metatheorizing of psychoanalytic, behavioristic, and Marxist theorizing. The era’s environmentalism was an exaggerated antigenetic reaction to the excesses of social Darwinism by Spencer and others earlier in the century, and held the hope of ameliorating the disturbed economic and political conditions left by World War I. Another shared ideological orientation was a loathing for the fascistic personality, a syndrome hard to define but (at least in those days) one knew it when one saw it. These revulsions against social Darwinism and fascism were probably related (Hofstadter, 1944; Stein, 1988). — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 331

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Hofstadter’s social Darwinism thesis and the general intellectual-history thread of how academic movements are shaped as negative reactions to prior excesses. — connects to: Gilded Age social Darwinism and ‘network effects’ both excuse capitalist concentration as fate — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 340