Against Idolatry: The Humanistic Ethics of Erich Fromm

Abstract

Erich Fromm remains an enigmatic figure in the Marxist theoretical tradition. In a career spanning six decades he never wavered in his commitment to a vision of a non-alienated democratic socialist society in the spirit of Marx’s humanistic philosophy, and the publication of his essay Marx’s Concept of Man in 1961 brought this ‘alternative’ Marx to a wide English-language readership for the first time.1 Naturally Fromm’s socialism was anathema to adherents of Stalinism, but even those sympathetic to the humanist Marxism of the Frankfurt School, of which he was a member throughout the 1930s, tended to accept Marcuse’s condemnation of Fromm’s revision of Freud and the implications of ‘accommodation’ to the status quo which went along with it. Nevertheless, Fromm was one of the most eclectic and innovative socialist theorists of the twentieth century. From the early days of his career as a psychoanalyst and social psychologist in late 1920s Frankfurt he was driven by the conviction that a social revolution was necessary to achieve human freedom. But whereas socialist theory had concentrated on the ‘objective’ economic and political conditions necessary to achieve its goal, Fromm was interested in the subjective preconditions. He was concerned with how human beings responded to structural change at the level of the unconscious, in particular how different social groups adopted certain character types which adjusted to changed circumstances.