Historical Origins
Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford theorized about a personality type that involved the “potentially fascistic individual”. They labeled it the "authoritarian personality" based on earlier writings by Erich Fromm that used this term. Because the historical influences for their theory included the rise of fascism in the 1930s, World War II, and the Holocaust, a main component of the "authoritarian personality" is being susceptible to anti-Semitic ideology and anti-democratic political beliefs. Their large body of research (known as the Berkeley studies) focused mainly on prejudice within a psychoanalytic/psychosocial theoretical framework (i.e., Freudian and Frommian).
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