In which of the following ways do both conservatives and liberals differ from radicals?

1 Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswick, Else, Levinson, Daniel J. and Sanford, R. Nevitt, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950).Google Scholar

2 Shils, Edward A., ‘Authoritarianism: “Right” and “Left”’ in Christie, Richard and Jahoda, Marie, Studies in the Scope and Method of the Authoritarian Personality (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954), pp. 24–9.Google Scholar

6 Stone, W. F., ‘The Myth of Left-Wing Authoritarianism’. Political Psychology, II (1980), 3–19.CrossRefGoogle ScholarBarker, E. N., ‘Authoritarianism of the Political Right, Center, and Left’, Journal of Social Issues, XIX (1968), 63–74Google Scholar; DiRenzo, G. J., Personality, Power, and Politics (Notre Dame. Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Hanson, D. J., ‘Dogmatism Among Authoritarians of the Right and the Left’. Psychological Studies, XIV (1969), 12–21Google Scholar; Knutson, J. N., ‘Psychological Variables in Political Recruitment’, mimeo (Berkeley, Calif.: The Wright Institute, 1974)Google Scholar; Smithers, A. G. and Lobley, D. M., ‘The Relationship Between Dogmatism and Radicalism/Conservatism’, in Eysenck, H. J. and Wilson, G. D., eds. The Psychological Basis of Ideology (Lancaster: MIT Press, 1978), pp. 263–72.Google Scholar

7 For a critique of Stone, see Eysenck, , ‘Left-Wing Authoritarianism: Myth or Reality?’, Political Psychology, III (1982), 234–8Google Scholar; and for a comment on both Stone and Eysenck, see Ray, J. J., ‘Half of All Authoritarians Are Left-Wing: A Reply to Eysenck and Stone’, Political Psychology, IV (1983), 139–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Many of the characteristics set out by Daniel J. Levinson, one of the authors of The Authoritarian Personality, to describe authoritarianism of the right turn out to be equally appropriate to a description of regimes of the far left. See his ‘Conservatism and Radicialism’. in Sills, David L., ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Volume 12 (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 27.Google Scholar

9 Schactman, Max, ‘Radicalism in the Thirties: The Trotskyist View’, in Simon, R. J., ed., As We Saw the Thirties (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), pp. 12–13.Google Scholar

12 Marcuse, Herbert, ‘Repressive Tolerance’Google Scholar, in Wolff, R. P. et al. , A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 81–123.Google Scholar

17 There have been, of course, some excellent studies of such radical organizations as the American Communist party that draw primarily on historical and documentary materials, along, perhaps, with the selective interviewing of certain individuals (often, former members). While these studies are able to provide significant insights into the activities, social composition, leadership, tactics, and historical development of certain radical movements, they do not sample the responses of the membership as such and do not make it possible, for example, to compare systematically the beliefs and values of supporters of the far left with those on the far right.

Examples of such studies include Draper, Theodore, The Roots of American Communism (New York: Viking Press, 1957)Google Scholar, and American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York: Viking Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Glazer, Nathan, The Social Basis of American Communism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961)Google Scholar; Klehr, Harvey, Communist Cadre: The Social Background of the American Party Elite (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar, and The Heyday of American Communism (New York: Basic Books, 1984)Google Scholar; and Selznick, Philip, Organizational Weapons: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952).Google Scholar Noteworthy studies that involve some measure of interviewing party members (or former party members) are Almond, Gabriel, The Appeals of Communism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Ernst, Morris and Loth, David, Report on the American Communist (New York: Henry Holt, 1952).Google Scholar

18 The Civil Liberties study employed a national cross-section sample of 1,993 adult Americans and 1,891 community leaders drawn from various vocations. The OVS study employed a national cross-section of 938 respondents and a number of additional samples of opinion leaders drawn from twenty-three national organizations, most of them strongly ideological and active in public affairs. The PAB study utilized a national cross-section sample of 1,484 adults and 3,020 political leaders who served as delegates to the 1956 Democratic and Republican conventions. For a fuller description of the studies, see McClosky, Herbert and Brill, Alida, Dimensions of Tolerance: What mericans Believe About Civil Liberties (New York: Basic Books, Russell Sage Foundation, 1983), pp. 25–31, 467–73.Google Scholar

20 It should be noted that all of the far-left respondents in the OVS and Civil Liberties surveys scored ‘low’ on the far-right scale: similarly, all of the far-right respondents in these two studies scored ‘low’ on the far-left scale. In the PAB study, there were a small number of respondents who scored ‘high’ on both the far-left and far-right scales. We have eliminated such respondents by selecting out for purposes of analysis only those extreme believers who scored high on one of the radicalism scales and low on the other. The reason for this was to screen out respondents whose careless response tendencies led them to answer not only inconsistently but chaotically. While there is, of course, a degree of overlap between the left and the right in certain of their values, attitudes and tactical perspectives, we concluded, after inspection, that scoring high on both scales was less a measure of a meaningful ideological statement than a sign of carelessness and even mindlessness in response style. Hence we chose, though with some misgivings, to exclude those respondents from the analysis.

22 In addition to the far-left and far-right scales, a number of scales were constructed to assess responses to the dependent variables considered in this study. The findings on these scales, and on some of the items they include, are presented below.

23 We might observe, parenthetically, that the differences between the far left and far right on these measures lend a degree of construct validity to the far-left and far-right scales and help to clarify the appropriateness of the far-left and far-right responses.

24 Further analysis shows that left radicals are also more intolerant of ambiguity than conservatives. Liberals are the most tolerant of ambiguity, but it is the conservatives who rank second. Nevertheless, liberals are considerably more tolerant of ambuiguity than conservatives (39 per cent of the liberals in OVS score ‘low’ on the scale compared to only 19 per cent of the conservatives).

In which ways does national conflict differ from ethnic conflict?

Why might the term Patriotic fail to characterize the Palestinian people?