The Broken Rebel: A Study in Culture, Politics, and Authoritarian Character. Rupert Wilkinson. New York:  Harper & Row, 1972.  viii + 390 pp.

In The Broken Rebel Rupert Wilkinson re-examines the psychodynamics of the authoritarian personality and refocuses attention on that character type and its social and political habitats. Whereas Adorno's study The Authoritarian Personality saw character structure essentially as a product of child-rearing procedures, Wilkinson successfully demonstrates that the interrelationship between character structure and culture is more complex and variable.

This study is actually an impressive contribution toward the development of the field of psychohistory. Wilkinson uses intensive case studies (lacking in the earlier Adorno work) and examines life histories of historical, political, and literary figures to form the typology of the authoritarian personality. He is especially successful in delineating the ways in which authoritarian character develops as a reaction to social change and disruption. Such a character emerges as low in self-esteem, with a rigid, punitive conscience, repudiating and denying his tender and gentler feelings, which he deems weakness. He becomes dependent and submissive to a powerful external authority, displaces what he repudiates in himself, and projects it upon those he sees as symbols of weakness and inferiority. Because of these diversionary maneuvers, Wilkinson calls this character a “broken rebel.”