The Specific Worldview Of Authoritarians

Because in 1943, Maslow wrote The Authoritarian Character Structure, a brilliant academic paper that helps us understand Vladimir Putin perhaps better than any recent psychological work. Though largely forgotten now, it influenced a host of social thinkers, including Theodor Ador...

Essentially, Maslow argued that it’s nonsense “to consider an authoritarian as simply an eccentric or ‘crazy person’” who is ultimately incomprehensible. In this light, few can forget the popular notion in the 1930s that Hitler was a ludicrous “madman,” hardly to be taken seriously by his...

If the world is jungle-like for an individual, then the authoritarian is perfectly justified in all his suspicions (and) hostilities. Once we understand this point, matters look very different. And among the chief characteristics of authoritarians that Maslow identified was the embrace of...

Maslow’s depiction of the authoritarian’s worldview seems chillingly accurate. But his genius in this 1943 paper was to seize Adler’s notion that our unconscious metaphors for life always reflect the reality of our own experience. “Once granted this worldview," Maslow crucially a...

Maslow was temperamentally an optimist and ended his influential paper by answering, “We can say ‘yes’ with the utmost assurance… (but) where there is no will or desire to become well, cure is very difficult.” It seems unlikely that Putin at age 69 will relinquish his wo...

Born in New York City in 1908, Abraham Maslow was the son of Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants. Like nearly two million others from Eastern Europe, his parents had come to the New World for physical safety from pogroms and economic opportunity. But Maslow’s connection to contemporary events is ...

Writing amid World War II with an unspoken nod to Stalin, Maslow began his paper with the wry observation that, “In this war, it is difficult to differentiate our friends from our enemies.” He decried that political analysts had failed to incorporate psychology into a full understanding o...