Abstract
The vision of the achievement of human solidarity is a recurring theme in the work of Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst and social theorist (1900–1980). His explicit commitment to a radical humanism that talks boldly about human essence and human potential runs counter to the skepticism and relativism currently prevailing in the academic social sciences. Despite the immense popular appeal of books like Escape From Freedom, The Sane Society, and The Art of Loving, his work now receives relatively little attention from academic writers. In his specialized field of social psychology and psychoanalytical theory there has been some attempt to draw attention to his significance,1 but in the wider field of social and political theory his name is rarely mentioned. As a political theorist I find this neglect unfortunate, for although Fromm could not be regarded as a political theorist in the narrow sense, his transdisciplinary approach has much to offer to students of politics and society today. His ethically driven communitarianism based on a strong, normative theory of human essence is a bold and refreshing antidote to postmodernist relativism. This book aims to retrieve Fromm’s valuable contribution to social and political thought and also to claim its continued relevance by relating his radical humanist approach to current thinking on feminism, work, consumerism, democracy, and globalization.
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Notes
For example, Daniel Burston, The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991)
Mauricio Cortina and Michael Maccoby (eds.), A Prophetic Analyst: Erich Fromm’s Contribution to Psychoanalysis (Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson, 1996).
See Pamela Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth Century France, 1814–1871 (London: Macmillan, 1995).
Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), p. 5.
Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)
Fromm pays tribute to the influence of “that great opus” in You Shall Be As Gods (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), pp. 12–13; on Cohen’s neo-Kantian socialism see Harry van der Linden, Kantian Ethics and Socialism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988).
Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion (Yale: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 93–95.
Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), p. 60.
Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York and London: Allen Lane Penguin, 2003), p. 121.
Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), p. 263.
Erich Fromm, “Sex and Character” (1943) in Fromm, Love, Sexuality and Matriarchy: About Gender (New York: Fromm International, 1999), pp. 114–115.
Margaret Canovan, “Sleeping Dogs, Prowling Cats and Soaring Doves: Three Paradoxes in the Political Theory of Nationhood” in Political Studies 49 (2), 2001, p. 212.
For an excellent collection on his work as a psychoanalyst see Mauricio Cortina and Michael Maccoby (eds.), A Prophetic Analyst: Erich Fromm’s Contribution to Psychoanalysis (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996).
Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be? (New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 174.
Charles Pasternak, Quest: The Essence of Humanity (Chichester and Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2003).
Erich Fromm, “Psychoanalysis and Sociology” in Stephen E. Bronner and Douglas M. Kellner (eds.), Critical Theory and Society: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 37–39.
Erich Fromm, The Dogma of Christ (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), pp. 46–47.
Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion, pp. 48–49.
Fromm, The Working Class in Weimar (London: Berg, 1984), p. 228.
Max Horkheimer, Foreword to Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. xxv
T. W Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswick, D. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: W. W Norton, 1969)—most acknowledgements to Fromm’s path-breaking work are provided in Else Frenkel-Brunswick’s contribution.
This view is convincingly expressed by Jose Brunner in “Looking into the Hearts of the Workers, or: How Erich Fromm Turned Critical Theory into Empirical Research” in Political Psychology 15 (4), 1994.
Erich Fromm, “The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology: Observations on Psychoanalysis and Historical Materialism” in Fromm, The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970), pp. 110–134.
This is also published in A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), pp. 477–496.
Erich Fromm, “Sozialpsychologischer Teil” in Erich Fromm Gesamtausagbe (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Antalt and München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), volume one, pp. 139–187—originally published in Studien über Autorität und Familie, Schriften des Institut für Sozialforschung 5 (Paris: Alcan, 1936).
Erich Fromm, The Revision of Psychoanalysis, Rainer Funk (ed.) (Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, 1992), p. 33.
John Schaar, Escape From Authority: The Perspectives of Erich Fromm (Evanston, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), p. 8.
Erich Fromm, Man For Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), pp. 57–58.
Michael Maccoby, Introduction to Eric Fromm and Michael Maccoby, Social Character in a Mexican Village (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books, 1996), p. xxii.
For an excellent discussion of the details of the Fromm-Marcuse dispute see John Rickert, “The Fromm-Marcuse Debate Revisited” in Theory and Society 15 (3), 1986, pp. 351–399.
See also Daniel Burston, The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), ch. 9, and Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, pp. 106–112.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (London: Thorsons, 1995), pp. 65–83.
Erich Fromm, “Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism” in Fromm, D. T. Suzuki, and R. De Martino, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (London: Souvenir Press, 1993) [originally I960].
Erich Fromm, May Man Prevail?: An Inquiry Into the Facts and Fictions of Foreign Policy (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1964), pp. 190–200.
Stephen Eric Bronner, “Fromm in America” on the CD Rom issued by the Erich Fromm Archive 225 Articles About Erich Fromm, 2001, pp. 5–6; Fromm’s manifesto, “Let Man Prevail,” is published in Erich Fromm, On Disobedience and Other Essays (New York: Seabury Press, 1981).
Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanised Technology (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1968).
Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (Continuum: New York, 1992).
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© 2004 Lawrence Wilde
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Wilde, L. (2004). Introduction: The Quest. In: Erich Fromm and the Quest for Solidarity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07511-6_1
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