Anti-authoritarianism

Anti-authoritarianism is opposition to authoritarianism. Anti-authoritarians usually believe in full equality before the law and strong civil liberties. Sometimes the term is used interchangeably with anarchism, an ideology which entails opposing authority or hierarchical organization in the conduct of human relations, including the state system.

Personality traits

In the Weimar Republic during the 1920s, German sociologist Erich Fromm began investigating the characteristics of authoritarian and anti-authoritarian sentiments, conducting a survey of German industrial workers which developed his theory on authoritarian personalities. By the 1930s, Fromm's Frankfurt School developed an interest in resistance to authority; at the time, they considered this through the lens of revolutionary politics, but their terminology later began to refer to the subject as anti-authoritarianism.

In the 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality, Theodor W. Adorno carried out a study of the characteristics of anti-authoritarians. Adorno and his colleagues found anti-authoritarian "low-scorers" to be opposed to hierarchy, injustice, autocracy and totalitarianism, and more likely than authoritarian "high-scorers" to resist social authorities who they perceived to uphold injustice. They categorised anti-authoritarians into six broad types: the "genuine liberal", who displayed a strong sense of autonomy, a capacity for critical thinking and a moral courage that led them to resist perceived injustice; the "rigid low-scorers", who had a dogmatic and superficial understanding of left-wing politics; the "protesting low-scorers", who rarely took action in accordance with their anti-authoritarian ideas due to their own psychological problems; the "impulsive low-scorers", who were unable to maintain a stable political ideology; and the "easygoing low-scorers", who rarely displayed a political ideology and preferred to focus on improving their individual situation rather than participating in social action.

Following the publication of Adorno's book, the term "anti-authoritarianism" gained more widespread usage among psychologists and sociologists, with Benjamin Spock using it to describe a laissez-faire approach to parenting. Later research by South African psychologist Jose Meloen found: that anti-authoritarians to be nine times more likely than authoritarians to engage in activism; that the more anti-authoritarian a person or group was, the more likely they were to engage in resistance activities; and that higher levels of education correlated with higher degrees of anti-authoritarianism. Meloen also found that, although authoritarians sometimes engaged in anti-authoritarian behaviour, such behaviour was not consistent and often isolated to individual situations.

Historical movements

After World War II, there was a strong sense of anti-authoritarianism based on anti-fascism in Europe. This was attributed to the active resistance from occupation and to fears arising from the development of superpowers. Anti-authoritarianism has also been associated with countercultural and bohemian movements. In the 1950s, the Beat Generation were politically radical and to some degree their anti-authoritarian attitudes were taken up by activists in the 1960s. Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War was largely led by anti-authoritarians, who participated in anti-war protests and engaged in conscientious objection. In the 1970s, anti-authoritarianism became associated with the punk subculture.

Following the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, an anti-authoritarian movement grew in response to the increasing power of the government of China over the region. The movement culminated in the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests against a proposed extradition bill, which eventually forced the bill to be withdrawn.

See also

• Anarchism
• Anarchist communism
• Anticonformism
• Civil libertarianism
• Criticism of fascism
• Criticism of monarchy
• Fascist (insult)
• Freedom of speech
• Freedom
• Green Mountain Anarchist Collective
• Individualism
• Libertarian socialism
• Libertarianism
• Liberty
• List of freedom indices
• Anti-neoauthoritarianism (China)
• Punk ideologies
• Question authority
• Social anarchism
• Social liberalism

Bibliography

• Cantoni, Davide; Heizlsperger, Louis-Jonas; Yang, David Y.; Yuchtman, Noam; Zhang, Y. Jane (2022). "The fundamental determinants of protest participation: Evidence from Hong Kong's antiauthoritarian movement". Journal of Public Economics. 211: 1–10. doi:10.1016/j.jpubeco.2022.104667. ISSN 0047-2727.
• Futter, Dylan B. (2016). "Philosophical Anti-authoritarianism". Philosophia. 44 (4): 1333–1349. doi:10.1007/s11406-016-9781-0.
• Gutherz, David (2019). "On Not Getting What You Want: Elvio Fachinelli's Anti-Authoritarianism". Psychoanalysis and History. 21 (3): 267–291. doi:10.3366/pah.2019.0307.
• Martin, J.; Ray, J. (1972). "Anti-authoritarianism: An indicator of pathology". Australian Journal of Psychology. 24 (1): 13–18. doi:10.1080/00049537208255780.
• Meloen, Jos (1991). "Anti-authoritarianism and political activism". South African Journal of Psychology. 21 (4): 261–266. doi:10.1177/008124639102100410.
• Newman, Saul (2001). From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power. Lexington Books. ISBN 0-7391-0240-0.
• Orenstein, David M.; Luken, Paul C. (1978). "Anarchistic Methodology: Methodological Anti-Authoritarianism as a Resolution to Paradigmatic Disputes in the Social Sciences". Sociological Focus. 11 (1): 53–68. doi:10.1080/00380237.1978.10570308.
• Rorty, Richard (2021). Pragmatism as Anti-authoritarianism. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674270060.
• Witoszek, Nina (2019). The Origins of Anti-Authoritarianism. Taylor & Francis. doi:10.4324/9781315164540. hdl:20.500.12657/76411. ISBN 9781315164540.