Alberto’s presentation focused on the work he has conducted behind a new introduction he’s written to ‘Prophets of Deceit – A study of the techniques of the American agitator’ from 1949 (which you can find here at Verso Books!). Written by Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, it was part of a five book series Studies in Prejudice published by the American Jewish Committee under the direction of Max Horkheimer, part of the Institute for Social Research at Columbia or as he called it, the Frankfurt School in exile.
This is particularly interesting for our current time, as it is a book that a number of commentators have referred to recently as speaking to the recent predicament in US politics as characterized by the ascendancy of Donald Trump and the increased mainstreaming of racist and reactionary political position. Alberto referred to recent articles in the Boston Review where from 2016 onwards Trump’s rhetorical and political strategies were said to be somewhat “anticipated” by this book from Löwenthal and Guterman.
The book emerged out of the Institute’s effort to understand the ‘fascist potentials’ within European society at large as they played out in psychology, culture and political economy. Initiated as part of a broader collective research project into anti-Semitism, Prophets of Deceit homed in on the tendencies towards fascism in the US, with important input from Adorno. One of the other significant works of the wider project of the Institute was The Authoritarian Personality in 1950, which Adorno co-authored.
The ‘prophets’ of this book’s title were mainly religious agitators gaining mass followings, and populist demagogues who would move between in-person rallies and radio addresses, such as Father Coughlan and Martin Luther Thomas. The book was the attempt to analyse the content of speeches, and the propaganda produced by these figures.
The Institute for Social Research itself was involved in mass studies of tendencies towards authoritarianism in German society; their Studies on Authority and the Family were published in exile in 1936. So in the 1940s, the interdisciplinary methods were brought to the US to analyse, and found a home at Columbia University where the Institute was housed originally. In Germany, they had carried out surveys and questionnaires of German workers aimed at detecting the latent or unconscious authoritarian potentials behind their nominally progressive political views (most interviewees would have voted Social-Democrat or Communist). Their findings discovered psychoanalytic tendences that were far more worrying than they might first appear, and made possible the rise of National Socialism. Horkheimer took these methods and brought them to analyse the US context. This is the context that led to Prophets of Deceit.
Löwenthal and Guterman tried to create a content analysis of the speeches of the agitators in the US in the 1930s, trying to detect a series of tricks or devices, following Adorno’s study of Martin Luther Thomas. This was interesting as it took a literary method to reveal their profoundly authoritarian rhetoric. Löwenthal talks to the predictive nature of some of their studies – it turned out to be a very fruitful encounter that Guterman brought to Löwenthal in terms of their work on ideology.
The focus of their analysis was on the key figure of the agitator; usually people in the margins. In their literary laboratory, so to speak, they analysed the rhetorical tricks and devices used by these small time agitators that could be then potentially scaled up in moments of social upheaval. Horkheimer identified that there needed to be an economic crisis that foregrounded these agitators’ rise in popularity; it was not just a socio-psychological effect, there also needed to be the political-economic situation in place for the rhetoric to have mass appeal. He drew on a much longer history of forms of irrational or manipulative leadership, connecting the relationship between leadership and the masses as a deeper mass-media communication structure, which undergirds the history of political modernity.
Horkheimer has some really striking comments in the essay which Alberto described (‘Egoism and the Freedom Movement’, published by the Institute in 1936) as fascinating to revisit in the present, about the centrality of the figure of the assembly, of the political rally, where the plebeian masses are led by a bourgeois leader who diverts their interests and needs into the status quo. He described this as a dimension worth understanding as there is much debate around presentism, propaganda, and agitation through mass media. It is also significant that the Institute for Social Research connected this to a much longer history, even back to the late Medieval world through the French Revolution to treatment of Jews in Europe in the 20th Century.
Marcuse wrote a short preface to the book in the 1970s in the context of Nixon, acknowledging the “features of the agitator as those of the political Establishment.” The way that he saw it, it was as if all the devices and techniques tested out by those marginal, isolated agitators were now fully domesticated and normalized in US politics. The key here is that the agitators are not the cause, or origin, they draw on the available techniques for their own successes. The fascist agitator takes jouissance in the identification of the ‘other’, for Löwenthal and Guterman this was the Jew, but now the rhetoric of such figures points much more generally to races other than white Christian Americans, privileging their position and gesturing towards white supremacy.
Some of the most striking analysis that relates to current time is the linking of fascism and innuendo, which is crucial for the agitator. Alberto referred to the following quote from Prophets of Deceit:
One of the curious things about the analysis that Löwenthal and Guterman performed that Alberto referred to is again the literature-based analysis that they conduct on what were actually speeches, where they chose not to focus on the modalities of communication, but only the content. They don’t speak to the affect of different mediums of communication, which is something he is keen to explore to take their work as a departure and examine this further.
This was a fascinating presentation, partly because I personally am not very familiar with the work of the Institute for Social Research, but also in how Alberto’s work in looking to the past can provide such clarity about our current social and political position. We are lucky enough to have Alberto as visiting Professor for two years in the School of Communication, so we look forward to hearing more in the future.