The project “Phantom Possession. The Authoritarian Personality and its Domains” proposes a novel theory of the authoritarian personality. It uses resources from intersectional feminist theory to update and integrate the accounts of authoritarian character formation by Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno. PhantomAiD’s core hypothesis is that contemporary right-wing and neofascist tendencies draw from a specific type of entitlement, an entitlement conceptualised as a property-like domain requiring control and defence. Such “phantom possession” structures the politicization of, for instance, abortion, immigration, gender, and environmental politics in destructive and defensive ways.
