The Anatomy of Prejudices

Since the end of the Second World War, social scientific studies of prejudice conducted in this country have come again and again to the same conclusion. Relentlessly, compulsively, they have announced that all prejudices are alike and that all people who are prejudiced are alike, sharing the characteristic that their prejudice against one group entails prejudice against all other groups as well. Intolerance is a general condition: it is a melting pot which so dissolves all differences among prejudiced people and their prejudices that all differences among victim groups dissolve, too. It is not surprising, of course, that this melting pot conclusion has recently been questioned by multiculturalists, who insist that each victim group has its irreducible specificity, its unique victimhood, sometimes its superlative—our suffering is the worst, this prejudice is the least acknowledged, this other one the most ubiquitous or radical. A theoretically inchoate surge of opposition has stressed victim group difference in face of the sameness conclusion. But this opposition frequently dissolves, too, because it does not go beyond victim group differences to focus on prejudiced people or their prejudices; the multiculturalists fall back on the argument that even if all prejudiced people are alike and do hate all out-groups, they can still select out a special target because of something perceived to be in the target.

Psychoanalysis and Marxism, in the post-War collaboration arranged by the Frankfurt School, contributed the first big impetus to the way studies in prejudices have repeated themselves. There is, so the authors of The Authoritarian Personality argued, a single “prejudiced personality”—a rigid, conventional, puritanical, unintrospective, shallow obsessional type—whose breeding ground is not the class struggle per se but the falsely enlightened bourgeois family under capitalism. It is not antisemites specifically, but rationalistic authoritarian “ethnocent