Review: Critical Theory and the Authoritarian Personality

Critical Theory and the Authoritarian Personality #

By Geoff M. Boucher Edinburgh University Press, 2025

Boucher, Geoff M. 2025. Critical Theory and the Authoritarian Personality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-1-3995-1945-8.

Geoff Boucher's preface tells you exactly what kind of book this is before the argument even starts. Researching a study of rightwing narrative fiction, he bought a copy of William Luther Pierce's The Turner Diaries, the 1978 novel that inspired Timothy McVeigh, and Amazon's recommendation algorithm did the rest. Within weeks his shopping suggestions "looked like a neo-Nazi bookstore." Working with collaborators, Boucher and Rachel Fetherston eventually catalogued close to a hundred self-published rightwing authoritarian novels, most of them genre fiction about a coming second American civil war, written largely by veterans who understand insurgency tactics and write, in Boucher's phrase, "as patient and precise as a sniper." That archive, more than any single theoretical claim, is what makes this book worth reading. It is Frankfurt School critical theory applied to primary source material that almost no one in the field has actually sat down and read.

Updating Adorno for the age of QAnon #

The book's stated task is to revive and revise the Frankfurt School's theory of the authoritarian personality, first developed in Adorno and Horkheimer's Studies in Prejudice (1950), for a political moment defined by QAnon, January 6, and the global resurgence of rightwing populism. Boucher accepts the classical theory's core claim, that a measurable minority of the population (11 to 16 percent, he reports, citing Karen Stenner's cross-cultural survey data) carries a durable cluster of authoritarian social attitudes that ideological propaganda can activate and radicalize. But he argues the classical Freudian apparatus built around the Oedipus complex, castration anxiety, and identification with a strict-father leader figure has not aged well, and turns to Lacan, by way of Slavoj Žižek's concept of "totalitarian subjectivity," to rebuild the theory's psychoanalytic foundation. The seven chapters move outward from that reformulation into a sequence of case studies: QAnon as collective fantasy, the classical theory's balance sheet, the Lacanian reworking itself, Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints, the survivalist genre, "neofascist" terrorist-manual novels like The Turner Diaries, and finally the neoconfederate second-civil-war fiction that closes the book.

Where the theory earns its keep #

The strongest theoretical move in the book comes early, in chapter 2's treatment of Adolf Eichmann. Boucher uses Eichmann's own psychiatric profile, drawn from Bettina Stangneth's biography and courtroom testimony, to test the classical theory against a case it should fit perfectly and doesn't. Eichmann's aggression was not organized around sexual fantasy or paternal identification in the way Adorno's Oedipal framework predicts; it was organized around identification with the abstract authority of the German nation and a self-image of "punctuality, lifeless chilliness, cynicism." Rather than force the case into the classical mold, Boucher lets the misfit stand and uses it to argue that the sadomasochistic character structure (following Fromm and the psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel) is the deeper substrate, of which the "authoritarian personality" is only the surface symptom under stress. This is real theoretical work: a classical concept tested against evidence, found wanting in a specific, documented way, and revised rather than simply reasserted.

The payoff of the Lacanian retooling shows up most clearly in the book's closing reading of neoconfederate insurgency fiction. Boucher argues that the genre's recurring villain, the "citizen-traitor," a grotesque, subhuman composite of every demographic the authors resent, functions as a psychoanalytic screen: virtually every trait projected onto this figure (craving domination, craving submission, obsessing over violence) actually describes the authoritarian subject's own disavowed desire. That is a genuinely illuminating way to read pages of ugly caricature without simply reproducing the caricature's own terms, and it is the kind of interpretive payoff that justifies close reading of material this unpleasant in the first place.

The interpretive technique is also the book's weak point #

The trouble is that a reading strategy built on projection and disavowal is difficult to falsify, and Boucher does not spend much time asking what a piece of authoritarian propaganda would have to look like for the Lacanian frame not to apply. Once a critic is committed to reading a villain as the return of the propagandist's repressed desire, that move is available for almost any hostile caricature in any political tradition, not just the rightwing insurgency genre. The Eichmann chapter shows Boucher is capable of subjecting a classical Frankfurt School claim to a real test; the neoconfederate chapter, by contrast, applies the Žižekian apparatus and reports what it finds, without asking what evidence would have counted against the reading. The book would be stronger if it had turned the same adversarial instinct on its own updated theory that it turned on Adorno's original one.

There is also a genre question the book raises but doesn't fully resolve. Boucher frames this as a contribution to critical theory's account of authoritarian psychology, but a large share of the actual analytical labor, in the QAnon, Camp of the Saints, survivalist, and neoconfederate chapters alike, is close reading of specific narrative texts: their plot mechanics, their use of pseudonymous digital publishing, their marketing niches on Amazon and Goodreads. That is valuable literary-critical and sociological work in its own right, and Boucher's dual training (he has also written on Habermas and literature) shows. But the book sometimes oversells itself as a revision to critical theory's theoretical architecture when what it more reliably delivers is an unusually well-documented literary sociology of a propaganda genre, read through a theoretical lens rather than substantially altering that lens.

Boucher's categorical distinction between "rightwing populism" (illiberal but pro-democratic parties like the AfD or Rassemblement National) and "rightwing authoritarianism" (explicitly anti-democratic movements like the Proud Boys or Oathkeepers), borrowed from Cas Mudde, is doing a great deal of load-bearing work in the introduction, keeping the book's claims from sprawling into an indictment of the entire populist right. It is a sensible distinction to draw. But Boucher's own examples complicate it: he notes that Trump represents exactly the case where an "influential incumbent, together with a wing of their party," crosses from one category into the other. If the boundary is that permeable in the book's own headline case, the tidy typology may be doing more analytical reassurance than the messy political reality actually supports.

How it reads #

The prose is clear and occasionally gripping, especially in the preface's account of the Amazon rabbit hole and in the extended close readings of specific novels, which quote enough of the source material (redacted slurs and all) to make the genre's rhetorical machinery visible without requiring the reader to go find these books themselves. Boucher writes as a critical theorist genuinely alarmed by what he found in the course of research rather than as a detached cataloguer, and that urgency is mostly an asset. The book is heavily footnoted and clearly the product of years of prior journal articles (several chapters began life as standalone pieces in Thesis Eleven, Religions, and elsewhere), which occasionally shows in some repetition of framing material across chapters.

Verdict #

This is a genuinely useful piece of applied critical theory precisely because it is willing to get its hands dirty with material most Frankfurt School scholarship never touches: a documented corpus of self-published rightwing insurgency fiction that Boucher and his collaborators appear to be the first academics to catalogue systematically. The Eichmann chapter shows the classical theory being tested and revised rather than merely cited, and the closing reading of neoconfederate fiction's "citizen-traitor" is a real interpretive achievement. But the Lacanian apparatus that generates that achievement is under-interrogated as a method, and the book's framing as a theoretical intervention in critical theory oversells work that is, chapter for chapter, more securely a contribution to the sociology and literary criticism of rightwing propaganda. Read it for the archive and for the Eichmann chapter's methodological honesty; treat the psychoanalytic readings of individual novels as suggestive rather than demonstrated.