In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the revulsion against Nazism tended to intensify the sentiments of suspicion and hostility towards authority. This reaction fostered a climate of estrangement from authority, which was frequently interpreted as merely a milder version of authoritarianism. In this historical context the practice of obedience itself was often associated with negative and potentially pathological form of behaviour.

Antagonism towards authority was more than matched by antipathy towards mass culture and the emotions it fostered. The emotional deficits of the masses were depicted as one of the forces responsible for the scourge of authoritarian dictatorships, and reflections on the problem of authoritarianism frequently took the form of deprecating the capacity of the masses for informed consent. Whereas in the early part of the twentieth century elite theories of mass society tended to be authored by conservative and right-wing ideologues, in the post-World War II era they were more likely to express the disappointment of liberal and left-wing commentators. In 1950, the radical social critic Theodor Adorno echoed Robert Michels, the theorist of the iron law of oligarchy, in observing that ‘throughout the ages’, ever since the oligarchy arose in Greece, ‘the majority of the people frequently act blindly in accordance with the will of powerful institutions or demagogic figures, and in opposition both to the basic concepts of democratism and their own rational interest’.