Neoliberalism’s Reengineering of the Authoritarian Personality: Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character and Mark Siemons’ Jenseits des Aktenkoffers Sabine von Dirke University of Pittsburg Abstract: Richard Sennett’s and Mark Siemons’ non-fiction narratives of life under neoliberal conditions are evocative of the broader understanding of the authoritarian personality structure as torn between a individualistic enlightened consciousness and blind obedience to power and authority� Hence, these two cultural critiques are instructive for assessing the relevance of this Frankfurt School concept as a valid analytic category for today’s socio-cultural fault lines, in particular today’s appeal of right-wing populism� The article argues that Sennett’s and Siemons’ cultural critiques elucidate how the neoliberal logic engenders conditions ripe for a resurging of the authoritarian personality in the very middle of Western societies� Drawing on Frankfurt School theorems, these cultural critiques debunk the critical potential of irony (Richard Rorty) and demonstrate that the authoritarian personality syndrome lurks today just as much in an ironic stance towards the world typical among an educated white collar middle class as in the violent articulations towards ethnic, racial, sexual or other minorities� Keywords: authoritarian personality, Frankfurt School, irony, neoliberalism, white collar employee The reception of the large scale collaborative research project published in 1950 under the title The Authoritarian Personality. Studies in Prejudice was controversial from its inception because of the interdisciplinary and novel nature of the study’s approach� As the introduction of Strength and Weakness. The Authoritarian Personality Today explains, the study aimed to synthesize “psychoanalytic concepts with empirical methodologies from such disparate fields as survey research and projective tests of personality” (Stone et al� 5)� In addition, the 328 Sabine von Dirke study interpreted its empirical results “auf dezidiert gesellschaftstheoretischer Grundlage” (Werz 40) which was typical for the research project’s Frankfurt School collaborators� In contrast to the controversial reception of the research project and its methodology, its key term, the authoritarian personality, showed amazing staying power over the decades albeit in a “selektive Wahrnehmung” (Werz 42-43) and with national variations� In light of Nazism and the Holocaust, the F(ascism)-scale dominated the comparatively belated (West) German reception� In the context of the 1960s countercultural upheavals, the concept of the authoritarian personality became dominant for research pursuing the question why the majority of the German people subscribed willingly to the authoritarian regime of National Socialism� The ultimate objective of such research was the development of an antiauthoritarian pedagogy which would inoculate the younger generations against authoritarianism and develop the democratic personality which the 1950s study of its counterpart identified as missing in Western societies� 1 The following exploration of the continuing relevance of the authoritarian personality structure as a valid analytic concept draws on a broad understanding of the term rather than a more narrow one focused on overt racial or ethnic prejudice for which the F-scale tested� Max Horkheimer laid out this broader horizon of the study in the preface to The Authoritarian Personality : The central theme of the work is a relatively new concept - the rise of an “anthropological” species we call the authoritarian type of man� In contrast to the bigot of the older style he seems to combine the ideas and skills which are typical of a highly industrialized society with irrational and anti-rational beliefs� He is at the same time enlightened and superstitious, proud to be an individualist and in constant fear of not being like all the others, jealous of his independence and inclined to submit blindly to power and authority� (XI) 2 It is my contention that the more universal concern of the 1940s study began to resonate in cultural critiques of neoliberalism already in the late 1990s even without overt use of the term itself� Two of these cultural critiques are particularly evocative of this broader understanding of the authoritarian personality as the historical separation of “emanzipatorische Vernunft und instrumenteller Rationalität” (Werz 42)� One of them is the well-known sociological narrative entitled The Corrosion of Character. The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism authored by the US-American social theorist, Richard Sennett, published in 1998; the other one, Jenseits des Aktenkoffers. Vom Wesen des neuen Angestellten by the German journalist, Mark Siemons, was published a year earlier in 1997� Both of these cultural critiques narrate how the normative neoliberal logic establishes the competitive capitalist market as the ultimate authority Neoliberalism’s Reengineering of the Authoritarian Personality 329 according to which everyone has to model themselves� They thereby elucidate how the neoliberal logic engenders conditions ripe for a resurging of the authoritarian personality in the very middle of society or, in other words, among highly educated and skilled white collar employees� In addition, both explorations of making a living and a life under neoliberal conditions employ figurative representation� Sennett speaks of the “Driven Man” ( Corrosion 105) or “Davos Man” (61) and Siemons of the “Kommunikator” or “Sinnsucher” (30-31) in order to apprehend the effect of neoliberalism on the subject. The most intriguing figure, the “Ironic Man,” features prominently in both portrayals of white collar employees in the United States and Germany respectively� Furthermore, Sennett as well as Siemons make reference to the US-American philosopher, Richard Rorty and his understanding of irony - a point not fully elaborated in their accounts nor in the following discussion� Instead, the subsequent analysis explores, based on a few succinct examples, how the authoritarian personality syndrome resonates in Sennett’s and Siemons’ accounts of neoliberalism� It thereby demonstrates that these cultural critiques suggest the authoritarian personality syndrome lurks today just as much in an ironic stance towards the world as in the violent articulations towards ethnic, racial, sexual or other minorities in Western societies for which the original 1950s study is perhaps best known� Although Sennett and Siemons use the term neoliberalism sparingly if at all, it shall serve here as a short hand for what the political theorist, Wendy Brown, defines as a “normative order of reason developed over three decades [1970s-1990s] into a widely and deeply disseminated governing rationality, […] [which] transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic” (9). Brown starts with Foucault’s conceptualization in his lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s, in which he argues that the generalization of “the form of the market” or “the enterprise form” results in an “economization of the entire social field” (Foucault 242)� Brown expands on Foucault by emphasizing that the form of the neoliberal market is not based on the exchange of equivalences providing for everyone involved in the transaction, albeit to varying degrees� Instead, the neoliberal market implements competition as the transactional paradigm from which only winners and losers, not mutually bound individuals, can arise� When competition becomes the market’s root principle, all market actors are rendered as capital and have to conduct themselves accordingly� In Browns theorizing, this means for individuals to reconfigure themselves in the image of the economic enterprise, constantly focused on “competitive positioning” (36) and maximization of value� The neoliberal logic thus vanquishes the Kantian subject as an end in itself while putting each individual “at persistent risk of 330 Sabine von Dirke failure, redundancy and abandonment through no doing of its own, regardless of how savvy and responsible it is” (37), which is a theme of Sennett’s earlier narrative of neoliberalism� By the 1990s, the neoliberal claim that only the capitalist market is true to itself and is therefore the authoritative arbitrator of all life had firmly established itself in the Euro-Atlantic world. Alongside the ascent of neoliberal doctrine as penultimate truth critical narratives emerged which exposed neoliberalism’s dark side which includes the reconstitution of social conditions ripe for the emergence of the authoritarian personality� In Corrosion of Character , Sennett performs a deconstruction of key claims made by neoliberal doctrine by analyzing how highly educated white collar employees, for instance, IBM programmers, have fared under the neoliberal regime� Before turning to two key neoliberal claims - a white collar work place of flat hierarchies and flexible work time -, a brief discussion of Sennett’s line of thought on authority and his terminology of character facilitates a better grasp of how neoliberalism aims at a reengineering of the subject to mold it in its image� In his 1980 volume entitled Authority , in which he engages with The Authoritarian Personality (24-25), Sennett like other social theorists posits power as an inevitable component of collective life and, therefore, always in need of being mediated by the practice of authority. Sennett defines authority not only as expertise in a particular field but also as taking responsibility for one’s decisions and actions, especially as they affect others. Taking responsibility for others requires, however, that which Sennett argues is being corroded by the New Capitalism, as he calls the neoliberal instantiation of capitalism he is witnessing and analyzing in 1998� In the preface to his Corrosion of Character he defines character as “the ethical value we place on our own desires and on our relations to others” ( Corrosion 10)� He emphasizes that character forms on the basis of “loyalty and mutual commitment” (10)� The neoliberal logic of market competition which pits individuals as human capital against each other systematically undercuts the interpersonal bonds necessary to establish legitimate authority� Sennett concludes that the absence of legitimate authority becomes most useful “in the exercise of domination” and “art of wielding power without being held accountable” (115) which he perceives to be rampant under neoliberal conditions� The teamwork model with flat hierarchies much hailed in neoliberal human resource management manuals and neoliberally reengineered companies functions in Sennett’s narrative as one concrete example for neoliberalism’s false claims of emancipating the individual from rigid, top down, i�e� “authoritarian” structures in the work place� Analyzing examples of the new teamwork model in organizations with flat hierarchies, Sennett observes instead that only “power is present in the superficial scenes of teamwork, but authority is absent” (114). Neoliberalism’s Reengineering of the Authoritarian Personality 331 He explains that the new teamwork model of flat hierarchies left the underlying power structure intact while deliberately removing the mediating practices of legitimate authority� The net result for the individual working in such neoliberal teamwork scenarios is worse than traditional hierarchies� For Sennett, this “absence of authority frees those in control to shift, adapt, reorganize, without having to justify themselves or their acts” (115). In the end, these “fictions of teamwork” as Sennett calls them, serve the corporation well because they undermine employee resistance to the constant rapid change thrusted upon them by the neoliberal regime of no long term and helps to deflect from root causes of exploitation and alienation. He provides a concrete example in the figure of the manager who explains all decisions affecting his team members with the rhetoric of everyone being just “victims of time and place” (115)� The former IBM employees represent Sennett’s most glaring example of how the neoliberal logic reaches deep into the individual and vanquishes inner-directed subject formation. After decades on full benefit jobs with IBM and after training their cheaper replacements from Southeast Asia, these US-American programmers were let go only to be hired back on a contract basis to do their old jobs for IBM, of course intermittently and without full benefits. Not surprisingly, Sennett reports that this group of programmers initially engaged in the kind of scapegoating of socio-economically weaker groups, in this case the cheaper Southeast Asian workers, which is typically found among individuals exhibiting the authoritarian personality� In concluding the discussion of Sennett’s cultural critique of the neoliberal work place as a fertile breeding ground for authoritarian character traits, my analysis turns to neoliberalism’s claim that the flexible work time regimes it implemented represents a net gain for the working population� Using again the IBM programmers as an example, Sennett’s account tells how the neoliberal practice of taskor project-based short-term employment contracts turned increasing numbers of highly educated and skilled white collar workers into “self-employed” temps� Being at the beck and call of corporate labor needs, i.e. working only intermittently on temporary contracts affects, however, the individual’s entire life world and life time. In the end, the new flexible work time regime puts the working population even more extensively into the grip of neoliberalism’s logic of winners and losers� Sennett’s account of neoliberalism’s reengineering of power and authority in the work place identifies a new character type emerging, namely the “Ironic Man” (116)� Drawing on Richard Rorty’s concept of irony, Sennett posits that “an ironic view of oneself is the logical consequence of living in flexible time, without standards of authority and accountability” (116)� Siemons’ Jenseits des Aktenkoffers tells the same story of neoliberalism as Sennett’s Corrosion of Character but is situated in Germany’s “Dienstleistungsgesellschaft” of the 1990s when consultant teams implementing neoliberal flexible work time regimes and flat hierarchies haunted the office floors in largescale economic or governmental organizations� Siemons’ narrative focuses on neoliberalism’s “soft” power, i�e� its hegemonic discourse and, in particular, how it managed to co-opt the antiauthoritarian critique of the 1960s� Similarly to Boltanski and Chiapello’s research on the French neoliberal turn, Siemons underscores the countercultural origins of the terms “Kreativität” (45) 3 and “Nonkonformismus und kritisches Bewusstsein” (62) which had become ubiquitous in job advertisements for even lowor mid-level administrative positions� His narrative of neoliberalism also shows how the co-optation of these terms drains them of their original promise of non-alienating working conditions as a legitimate human need� Most importantly, his Jenseits des Aktenkoffers confirms neoliberalism’s power to vanquish categories of labor and social class which form the basis to analyze alienation and exploitation according to the political theorist Wendy Brown (38)� Siemons’ Jenseits des Aktenkoffers consists of detailed vignettes of white collar employees and their culture reminiscent of Siegfried Kracauer’s seminal 1920s study, Die Angestellten . At the same time, however, significant differences need to be acknowledged between these two texts� For one, the white collar jobs in the media business, public relations and consulting firms from which Siemons derives his figure of the “Angestellter” in the 1990s require a high educational level and more “soft” skills of which communication is the most important one� Secondly, not a mindless hunt for quick distraction through entertainment typical for Kracauer’s lower-level employees but an ironic or melancholic stance towards the world characterizes the highly educated and skilled white collar employees who are at the center of Siemons’ accounts� Even though Sennett’s and Siemons’ narratives exhibit many similarities in the description of the neoliberal work regime, their conceptual frameworks differ. Siemons favors a phenomenological approach to his object of study. He elucidates the “Wesen” of the “Angestellten-Existenz” - as he calls it - from the surface phenomena in which it articulates itself, be it the purposefully crafted office design, choice of dress, or mode of speaking. Hence, Siemons’ analysis of white collar employee culture in the late 1990s aspires to be a “Phänomenologie eines allgemein gewordenen Blicks auf die Welt, der von seinen eigenen Bedingungen nichts wissen will” (11)� Siemons claims that those who take on this perspective -which means an ironic stance towards the world - are not willing to acknowledge the conditions which produce it� Siemons thus also points to the conundrum Horkheimer already identified in the preface to The Authoritarian 332 Sabine von Dirke Personality : The authoritarian personality structure can accommodate contradictory traits - enlightenment and superstition, independence and submissiveness - to whatever claims authority� Put more succinctly, Siemons’ narrative shows that white collar employees see through neoliberalism’s false claims but instead of dismantling them, they accommodate them within their ironic world view and do so willingly� Not surprisingly, Siemons’ vignettes of white collar employees’ conduct and culture are often cast in an ironic tone signaling that the author of this tale of neoliberalism recognizes his own positionality and complicity with the system� Siemons wrote his treatise after all as a journalist in the employ of a major German weekly� Central for Siemons’ analytic project is Theodor W� Adorno whose negative perspective on “das Büroleben” in the latter’s Minima Moralia opens up Jenseits des Aktenkoffers � Siemons’ phenomenological approach starts from Adorno’s point of departure for all social and cultural critique - that is, from the alienated modes of life from which the true condition needs to be gleaned by way of critique� Adorno’s lesser-known contributions to The Authoritarian Personality are, relevant for the following analysis of Siemons’ tale of neoliberalism’s reengineering of the authoritarian personality for the 21 st century� Within the broad concept of the authoritarian personality, Adorno specifies a variety of different articulations of the syndrome. The one which he identifies as the “potentially most dangerous syndrome,” namely the “manipulative” one (369-73), resonates most strongly in Siemons’ portrayal of the neoliberally reengineered white collar employee� According to Adorno, the particular dangerous nature of the manipulative articulation of the authoritarian personality arises from the extreme stereotype to which it subscribes: “rigid notions become ends rather than means, and the whole world is divided into empty, schematic, administrative fields. There is an almost complete lack of object cathexis and emotional ties” (369)� Furthermore, the manipulative authoritarian personality syndrome results in a “compulsive overrealism which treats everything and everyone as an object to be handled, manipulated, seized by the subject’s own theoretical and practical patterns” (369)� Hence, a blind activism which means just doing things for the sake of doing something becomes the central aspect of behavior of the manipulative type without regard to the task’s content or validity� Adorno locates this personality syndrome especially in “business people, members of the rising managerial and technological class” who invest their libidinal energy in the “technical aspects of life�” He concludes that their “sober intelligence, together with their almost complete absence of affection makes them the most merciless” (369)� Neoliberalism’s Reengineering of the Authoritarian Personality 333 334 Sabine von Dirke Theorizing in the immediate shadow of the Holocaust, Adorno references, of course, the engineers who designed the gas chambers as an example� Considering that antiauthoritarian educational principles took hold in West Germany, this example of an utmost amoral articulation of the manipulative authoritarian personality syndrome does no longer apply in nuce to the white collar employee culture of the 1990s Siemons investigates� 4 Siemons’ description of the actual labor white collar workers perform and the behavior it brings to the fore resembles, however, Adorno’s scathing portrayal of the manipulative authoritarian personality type� Siemons maintains that the immaterial labor white collar employees perform in the 1990s does not require any specific professional skill or expertise which could serve as an anchor for identity� Instead, Siemons argues that the white collar employees’ “Kompetenz besteht nicht in einer bestimmten Wissenschaft oder Handwerksgattung, sondern in der schwebenden, vollends entgrenzten Kunst des Managen selbst, die sich allen Gegenständen anverwandeln kann” (20)� Siemons features the soft skill of communication as the key to the art of successful performance of administrative tasks which typically does not result in a tangible product, a “Werk,” in which the employee could recognize his or her labor� Siemons’ account depicts this key characteristics of administrative work, namely that it consists of ephemeral labor of communication, as a double-edged sword for the white collar employee� On the one hand, the magic want called communication allows the white collar employee discursive self-creation� On the other hand, and strongly echoing Adorno’s characterization of the manipulative authoritarian personality, it results in empty, purely formal activities: “[D]as Werk, das vollbracht wird, ist in der Kommunikation des Angestellten auswechselbar und leer; zum Wesentlichen wird die von Inhalten gereinigte Form der Übermittlung” (101)� Following Siegried Kracauer’s 1920s narrative of white collar employees and Jürgen Kocka’s research on the historical development of the white collar employee alongside the process of industrialization, Siemons maintains that the term “Angestellter” implied from the very beginning “Unsicherheit” with respect to his or her class position within the social totality� Hence, he calls the white collar employee a “Zwitterwesen” (16)� Consequently, Siemons posits that the “neue ‘Mittelstand’, der sich bildet, ist keine gesellschaftliche Grösse mehr, sondern eine von ökonomischen Funktionen und ideologischen Überbauten abhängige und daher sich ständig verändernde Konglomeration von ihren Platz im Ganzen suchenden Monaden” (16) of white collar employees� Bereft of any extra-economic authority, die “Stelle,” i�e� one’s place of work, not only gains in significance as a means of income but becomes the authority experienced as missing in all other aspects of life: Neoliberalism’s Reengineering of the Authoritarian Personality 335 Jedenfalls stellt der betriebliche Rahmen des Angestellten-Daseins mittlerweile eine Autorität dar, wie sie im übrigen Leben schwer zu finden ist. Deshalb schenkt ihm der Angestellte seine besten Kräfte […]� Kein Ort wird ihm so bedeutungsvoll wie das Büro mit dessen wachsenden Verpflichtungen. Er schenkt dem Büro seine Persönlichkeit und lässt diese von ihm formen� (17) When Siemons claims that the work place shapes the personality, he implicitly speaks about the deformation the character or self of the white collar employee suffers through his/ her submission to the neoliberal logic which governs the white collar work place by the end of the 1990s� Siemons explicates this deformation by applying Frankfurt School paradigms� He speaks of the “innerbetriebliche Herrschaftsdiskurs” as a “geschlossenes System von Definitionen, Rede-weisen, Wertungen” (101) which - under neoliberal conditions - are all those of the competitive market. Yet, different from the Weberian-style largescale, slowly changing economic enterprise, the new neoliberal corporation celebrates change and is, therefore, constantly in flux, resulting in a feeling of insecurity and being at drift - to use Sennett’s language� In order to bring his critique of the hegemonic discourse of neoliberalism to a head, Siemons even posits that what is perceived as a most spontaneous expression of human affect, laughter, is now just as much an expression of the individual’s unconditional identification with the neoliberal social totality: “Es empfiehlt sich, klar und unmissverständlich zu lachen, weil man damit zum Ausdruck bringt, dass man seine Zugehörigkeit zum Ganzen entschieden bejaht, nicht etwa einen Vorbehalt in seinem Inneren hegt” (101)� Siemons’ description of the intra-organizational discourse as domination not only adopts Adornian phrasing but articulates another key character trait Adorno ascribes to the manipulative authoritarian personality syndrome� In discussing the responses of one particular college-educated high scorer on the authoritarian scale, Adorno probes what “loyalty” means for this interview subject� Adorno argues that for the authoritarian personality structure loyalty takes the form of surrender which means giving up “all individual particularities for the sake of the ‘whole’” (373) and speculates that this form of blind obedience compensates for the lack of affection in these personality structures. In Siemons’ portrayal of white collar culture at the cusp to the new millennium the blind obedience for “the sake of the ‘whole’” which Adorno posited as one element of the manipulative authoritarian personality means willing subjugation to neoliberalism’s normative logic of competition at all cost� In more concrete terms, Siemons uses as an example for this obedience how the individual employee opportunistically organizes all of his interpersonal contacts on and off the job according to the power structure within the corporation. In the end, 336 Sabine von Dirke Siemons’ narrative like Sennett’s argues that the neoliberal condition erodes all extra-economic values and ideals which before the onset of the neoliberal dusk allowed employees to find an anchor for their character outside of work (102). The moment of these cultural critiques of neoliberalism is of relevance in order to understand their epistemological labor� Writing in the 1990s not only after the fall of real-existing socialism in the USSR but also after the postmodernism debate with its claim of irony’s intrinsic critical faculty, Siemons’ figure of the highly educated white collar employee is fully endowed with a critical consciousness and fully cognizant of his and her complicity with the social totality� Siemons’ narrative resolves the conundrum it records, namely of highly educated white collar employees knowingly identifying with the forces which destroy the conditions for the possibility of subjecthood, by connecting the perspective of irony with the description of white collar employees as the mythological figure of the demiurge� 5 In Greek mythology, the demiurge is only a half-god who is never the creator of matter but only a facilitator or, in other words, a technical virtuoso who orders and shapes the universe from the already existing matter according to another authority’s design� As the political theorist Wendy Brown explicates, under neoliberal conditions the only authority left is the capitalist competitive market which renders every individual into human capital to be managed in accordance with the economic form� By equating the white collar employee with the demiurge, Siemons’ account of the neoliberal organization of society and the subject positions it engenders illuminates that the white collar employee - as flexible, imaginative, creative s/ he may be - always remains in a subordinate position within the neoliberal total organization of society� Siemons thereby also reveals the limited power of an ironic stance towards the world� To conclude: Within the figure of the “Ironic Individual” which cultural critiques at the end of the twentieth century construct in their examination of the neoliberally reorganized social totality of their times nests a disposition comparable with the authoritarian personality elaborated by the seminal study of the 1940s� Both Siemons’ and Sennett’s narrative of making a living and a life under neoliberal conditions highlight irony as the primary coping strategy of white collar employees� Irony may allow white collar employees to ride out the tension of knowingly and willingly subjugating themselves to what they recognize as an exploitative and alienating regime� Yet, irony can therefore also function as a new “iron cage” because, as Siemons puts it, irony only permits “dem Angestellten, ein Leben im Schwebezustand, im Als-ob zu führen” (117)� Siemons argues similarly to Sennett that living in the Subjunctive II does not provide the conditions for the possibility of selfhood and autonomous agency� For Sennett’s IBM programmers this means lives lived in a constant state of “recovery” and retreat into their family and churches in order to endure the Neoliberalism’s Reengineering of the Authoritarian Personality 337 pain of being a “loser” in the neoliberal market� Siemons’ white collar employees suffer from a perhaps more pathological affliction, namely melancholia, once they have exhausted irony as a prop for survival� Both of these responses are characterized by producing paralysis rather than agency within the individual human being� In particular, and this is Wendy Browns concern, the neoliberally reengineered authoritarian personality can no longer imagine itself as a sovereign citizen but only as winners, or losers, within the competitive economic market� Siemons’ narrative points already in 1997 into the direction of Brown’s concern for sacrificing the concept of the sovereign citizen and the collective as a demos at the altar of the market� In his speculation of what Germany’s future might hold, Siemons underscores that neoliberalism engenders personality dispositions which can evolve into less benign attitudes and behaviors than irony if the material conditions of the social situation changes: Wenn also die materielle Souveränität verlorgen ginge, dann würden die über sich selbst enttäuschten Angestellten sich schon ein desillusioniertes neues Selbstbild zusammenzimmern, das sie dem Rest der Welt ein weiteres Mal enthebt� Vermutlich hätte dieses Selbstbild ein etwas weniger angenehmes Aussehen als das jetzige� (142) The epistemological value of Sennett’s and Siemons’ cultural critiques of the 1990s lies in the narrative anticipation of social developments which social science research conducted since the 2000s confirms empirically. A case in point is a longitudinal study conducted by the University of Leipzig: its last installment published in 2016 has the telling title Die enthemmte Mitte - Autoritäre und rechtsextreme Einstellungen in Deutschland � Notes 1 For details see Baader� 2 All subsequent references are to the abridged edition� See Works Cited for full reference� 3 See the entire chapter entitled “Künstler: Entfremdung verboten” (42-48)� 4 For an empirical study evaluating the success of the antiauthoritarian pedagogy in Germany see Lederer� 5 See chapter IV in Jenseits des Aktenkoffers , “Der Angestellte als Ironiker und Demiurg�” Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W�, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J� Levinson, and R� Nevitt Sanford� The Authoritarian Personality � Abridged Edition� New York/ London: Norton, 1982� 338 Sabine von Dirke Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello� The New Spirit of Capitalism. Transl� Gregory Elliott� London/ New York: Verso, 2005� Brown, Wendy� Undoing the Demos. 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