Reply #15: This sounds like Adorno's book

[Rich Hunt]

"The Authoritarian Personality".

http://www.anesi.com/fscale.htm

also:

http://mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/chap7/chap7l.htm

What kind of people would follow an aggressive, arrogant, critical, prejudiced leader? The classic book on this topic is The Authoritarian Personality. These authors (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson & Sanford, 1950) described several traits of authoritarian leaders, like Hitler, and their followers, like the German people:

1. Rigid, unthinking adherence to conventional, middle-class ideas of right and wrong. The distinction has to be made between (a) incorporating (as in Kohlberg's stage 6--see chapter 3) universal values and (b) having blind allegiance to traditional social-political-religious customs or organizations. Examples: an egalitarian person who truly values one-person-one-vote, equal rights, equal opportunities, and freedom of speech will support a democracy, not a dictatorship. A person who says, "I love my country--right or wrong" or "America--love it or leave it" may be a flag-waving, patriotic speech-making politician who is secretly an antidemocratic authoritarian (similar in some ways to Hitler). For the authoritarian the values of respecting and caring for others are not as important as being a "good German" or a "good American" or a "good Catholic" or a "good Baptist."

Important values to an authoritarian are obedience, cleanliness, success, inhibition or denial of emotions (especially anger and even love), firm discipline, honoring parents and leaders, and abhorring all immoral sexual feelings. This was the German character. Authoritarian parents tend to produce dominated children who become authoritarian parents. Egalitarians produce egalitarians.

So, I don't think this is really news.