Sips & Scholars: Robyn Marasco on "The Authoritarian Personality Today"

Sips & Scholars is a free lecture series in partnership with Brooklyn Institue of Social Research set in bars and restaurants all over Brooklyn. This session, entitled: The Authoritarian Personality Today: Psychology, Politics, and the New Right-Wing Resurgence will be led by Professor Robyn Marasco. 

The talk will reconsider a pathbreaking book, The Authoritarian Personality, in light of American politics in the present. First published in 1950 by a team of researchers, including Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality offered a preliminary account of the personality type susceptible to fascist agitation and ideology. The authors sought to identify the risk-factors for fascism in postwar America. Re-reading The Authoritarian Personality today, we can better grasp the uses of psychoanalysis in the social sciences and discern the aspects of American society that feed authoritarian impulses today. 

Everyone is welcome! Come ready to learn and open to discuss interesting questions together. Advanced reading is not required, but we encourage you to check out the suggested booklist.

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PARTICIPANT

Robyn Marasco is Associate Faculty at BISR and Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY.  Her research has focused on the distinctive contributions of critical theory, feminism, and psychoanalysis to the study of politics. Her first book, The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory after Hegel (Columbia UP, 2015), reconstructs the emancipatory project of critical theory around the idea of negative dialectics.  Her articles have appeared in leading journals in the humanities and social sciences, including the American Journal of Political Science, Political Theory, PS, Contemporary Political Theory, New German Critique, boundary2, Philosophy & Social Criticism, and Constellations. Professor Marasco was the guest editor of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on “The Authoritarian Personality” and guest co-editor, with Banu Bargu, of a special issue of Rethinking Marxism on “The Political Encounter with Louis Althusser”.  She has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ and at the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale University.  Her current book project, Toward a Political Theory of the Family, pursues a distinctly political interpretation of the family in twentieth-century critical theory.  Professor Marasco is co-editor of Polity, Journal of Political Science.