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Four basic ideological positions have been identified in the modern world: fascist, communist, conservative, and liberal (including social-democratic). Studies such as The Authoritarian Personality (1) indicate that general repressiveness and severity of the superego are correlated with belief in the more authoritarian ideologies, which themselves show a consistency of basic features in their various applications (politics, religion, morals, economics, esthetics, etc). This work and others more or less imply that a single dimension is important to the understanding of ideology, and of personality insofar as it is relevant to ideology. Social democracy or liberalism, and ego-strength, are placed at one end of this dimension, fascism and superego-severity at the other, and conservatism presumably in between. The communist ideology is not accounted for. I fully accept the correlation of the more authoritarian ideologies with superego-severity in the personality, i. e. with extreme repressiveness, conformism, punitiveness, hostility, etc. However I feel that two qualitatively different types of severe superego can be identified, one explaining the fascist, the other the communist, authoritarian extreme.
First let me show the naturalness of a two-dimensional treatment of ideology. The basic ideologic correlate of the severe superego is an insistence upon strong controls in society. Social controls however can be of two types, which I shall call “coercing” and “integrating”. The first type