Why do so many people not merely tolerate but enthusiastically affirm the conditions of contemporary capitalism? This book argues that late modernity is producing a new social character. Drawing on Critical Theory's concept of social character (Fromm, Adorno) and Marcuse's notion of the affirmative, it revisits the authoritarian personality and its continued relevance—and identifies its contemporary successor: the affirmative character, marked by an uncritical embrace of the existing order. Its closest ancestor is the manipulative character that Adorno, in his late writings, singled out as the most dangerous type of all: instrumental, emotionally detached, and identified with technology rather than with people.

The study traces the roots of this character in a long Western tradition of asceticism—Odysseus bound to the mast, the expulsion from Paradise, today's cult of fitness. Contemporary achievement society builds on this tradition but strips it of any promise of transcendence: self-discipline no longer serves salvation, only performance. The decisive forces shaping the new character are modern communication media, most of them born in Silicon Valley, and the work and organizational psychology developed within these companies—a fusion of countercultural self-liberation and free-market ideology that Barbrook and Cameron memorably termed the "Californian Ideology."

Combining theory with empirical research, the book presents a newly developed psychometric scale for the affirmative character, validated across two studies

David W.G.F. Jäger studied political science, sociology, philosophy, educational sciences, German studies, and psychology, and earned his doctorate at the University of Groningen. He is a research associate at the Chair of Political Science, specializing in Comparative Politics, at the University of Passau, and also works as a psychologist in a psychiatric clinic. As Principal Investigator, together with Arthur Bueno and Lars Rensmann, he leads the Gerda Henkel Foundation-funded research project “The New Authoritarian Character: Germany and Brazil in Comparison.”