Starting with his 1947 essay Wagner, Nietzsche and Hitler,^[30] Adorno produced a series of influential works to describe psychological fascist traits. One of these works was The Authoritarian Personality (1950),^[31] published as a contribution to the Studies in Prejudice performed by multiple research institutes in the US, and consisting of a 'qualitative interpretations' that uncovered the authoritarian character of test persons through indirect questions.^{[citation needed]}The books have had a major influence on sociology and remain highly discussed and debated. In 1951 he continued on the topic with his essay Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda, in which he said that "Psychological dispositions do not actually cause fascism; rather, fascism defines a psychological area which can be successfully exploited by the forces which promote it for entirely non-psychological reasons of self-interest."^[32]

In 1952 Adorno participated in a group experiment, revealing residual National Socialist attitudes among the recently democratized Germans. He then published two influential essays, The Meaning of Working Through the Past (1959), and Education after Auschwitz (1966), in which he argued on the survival of the uneradicated National Socialism in the mind-sets and institutions of the post-1945 Germany, and that there is still a real risk that it could raise again.^[33] Later on, however, Jean Améry—who had been tortured at Auschwitz—would sharply object that Adorno, rather than addressing such political concerns, was exploiting Auschwitz for his metaphysical phantom "absolute negativity" ("absolute Negativität"), using a language intoxicated by itself ("von sich selber bis zur Selbstblendung entzückte Sprache").^[34]