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Erich Fromm (1900–1980) was a German-Jewish-American psychoanalytic social critic, humanistic thinker, and social psychologist who first visited the United States in 1933 to lecture and then immigrated the following year to escape the rise of the Nazi state.

Closely associated with the Frankfurt school of critical theory, Fromm combined a deep nonreligious understanding of biblical texts with close readings of Marx, Freud, and others to produce an original body of work that highlights the contradictions and development of Western liberal democracy as it pertains to the mental health and well-being of its citizens. Fromm’s basic insight is that the psychological toll of market economies’ emphasis on competition and material accumulation has made individuals vulnerable to forms of authoritarian rule that paradoxically mirror their own fear of freedom. Fromm, however, was no social determinist or pessimist but argues that human community can be built on a reawakened sense of reason, solidarity, and love. Although underplaying the role of institutions and constitutional safeguards such as separation of powers, checks and balances, and civil liberties that might be invoked to protect the citizen from the state, Fromm’s work nevertheless remains fresh and full of insight regarding the role of self-understanding and mass psychology in the contemporary world.

The most enduring of Fromm’s books for political scientists is his 1941 tour de force Escape from Freedom. In recounting the emergence of the individual from the Middle Ages through the Protestant Reformation and the subsequent development of capitalism, Fromm posits a dynamic social psychosocial theory that examines the personal and social structures that contribute to the making of an “authoritarian character.” This emergence, recapitulated in an extreme form in the rise of Nazi Germany, includes personality types driven by economic social forces and unconscious pathological anxieties who would willingly give up the “burden of freedom” and submit to the manipulation of hateful and repressive leaders rather than face the ambiguities and uncertainties of being human in the modern world. Looked at from a historical and comparative perspective, what can be thought of as Fromm’s political theory of collective action and human behavior in times of accelerated economic transformation and stress has important implications for understanding globalization and the rise of religious fundamentalism and reactions to it in the twenty-first century.

Having published more then twenty books and three hundred articles, Fromm continually explores the interplay of ideas and social structures on the formation and malformation of human personality and by implication politics. In The Sane Society (1955), Fromm argues that affluent democratic societies could be “sick” due to the constant bombardment of advertising and creation of personality types that act more like conforming robots than free and autonomous individuals. In The Art of Loving (1956), Fromm argues that in an alienated capitalist society, love is more often than not unconsciously confused with the buying and selling of goods, thereby transforming the beloved into an object of desire rather than a subject of mutual trust and respect. Fromm paid his most explicit theoretical debt to Freud and Marx in Beyond the Chains of Illusion (1962), arguing that human freedom lies in the awareness of the inner and outer constraints that bind the individual and society. Only in conscious choices can a more just and peaceful world be achieved.

The political theorist John Scharr, perhaps Fromm’s sharpest critic, argues that Fromm is a utopian thinker whose emphasis on human freedom avoids the difficult political choices of authority. Despite the criticism that Fromm offered no practical way out of the modern dilemma, he was active in politics in the 1950s and 1960s for a time as a member of the Socialist Party of America and a supporter of Senator Eugene McCarthy’s run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Fromm was also the author of May Man Prevail? An Inquiry into the Facts and Fictions of American Foreign Policy (1961) and cofounder of SANE, an activist peace group that called for a ban on nuclear weapons.

Bibliography:

Funk, Rainer. Erich Fromm: His Life and Ideas. New York: Continuum, 2000.
Schaar, John H. Escape from Authority: The Perspectives of Eric Fromm. New York: Basic Books, 1961.
Wilde, Lawrence. Erich Fromm and the Quest for Solidarity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.