Rediscovering Erich Fromm

In a scene from Elia Kazan’s 1957 film, A Face in the Crowd, a group of writers discusses the surprising popularity of Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, a Southern drifter–turned–television star whose ability to manipulate his viewing audience into buying certain products or supporting particular political candidates deeply troubles them. Hanging on their office wall is a sign that reads “Escape from Freedom,” a reference to German psychologist Erich Fromm’s 1941 study of the rise of fascism in Europe. Kazan’s nod to Fromm’s book reflects not only the importance that Escape from Freedom had in framing discussions in the United States about the appeal of totalitarianism but also the widespread influence that Fromm had within American culture in general. In this well-researched and splendidly written biography, Lawrence Friedman reveals the many “lives” of this influential European intellectual—psychoanalyst, social psychologist, peace activist, self-help guru, German elitist, democratic socialist, radical humanist, and religious thinker. Throughout, Friedman reminds us of the important legacy of this peculiar “Renaissance man” (p. xix), whose academic star has waned since the height of his influence in the 1960s, but who “helped to pave an alternative path for his day and for ours, one contoured by love and what he called humanism” (p. xxxv).

In many ways, Fromm’s fame rested on the success, both in popular and academic circles, of Escape from Freedom, which shaped mid–twentieth-century interpretations of totalitarianism. Most American social scientists in the 1940s and 1950s—David Riesman, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Paul Lazarsfeld, Harold Lasswell, Gabriel Almond, and many others—leaned heavily on Fromm’s work to explain not just the appeal of totalitarian movements but the formation of political beliefs in general. Borrowing themes from Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud, Fromm argued that the origins of totalitarianism rest in the changes produced by the rise of capitalism, which uprooted the foundations of medieval society and liberated the individual from the bonds of family, church, and caste. Free to determine his or her way in the world, the modern individual ironically came to feel lonely and anxious, particularly in the advanced stages of capitalism in the twentieth century, when large bureaucratic structures and faceless industries dominated the landscape. According to Fromm, freedom therefore became a burden, leading the individual to abdicate responsibility for his or her own existence and to submit instead to a totalitarian state as an antidote to his or her psychological malaise. Fromm characterized this “escape from freedom” in psychoanalytic terms, seeing within the modern individual sadomasochistic impulses that led to the individual subordinating himself or herself to domineering state authorities while encouraging the ruthless destruction of others as scapegoats for the individual’s powerless condition. Politics, argued Fromm, became an outlet for individual psychological pathologies. Escape from Freedom resonated with intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic trying to understand the rise of fanaticism, nationalism, and ethnic and racial prejudices.

Naturally, as Friedman argues, Fromm’s personal history shaped his understanding of totalitarianism. Born in 1900 in Frankfurt, Germany, to lower-middle–class Jewish parents, Fromm struggled to escape the jingoistic culture around him. He also struggled, as Friedman details, to escape the “smothering possessiveness” of his mother and the “neurotic unevenness” of his father (p. 6). Luckily, Fromm found others in his life to guide him, including his father’s employee, Oswald Sussman, who introduced him to the writings of Karl Marx; his uncle, Emmanuel Fromm, who acquainted him with the riches of European culture; and Rabbi Nehemiah Nobel, the leader of Frankfurt’s Orthodox Jewish community, who helped Fromm embrace Jewish mysticism. All three traditions—Marxism, European high culture, and Jewish mysticism—shaped his intellectual development. But, as Friedman notes, Fromm also struggled as a young adult to understand the “bloody and traumatic” experience of World War I (p. 9). After meeting and falling in love with Frieda Reichmann while completing his studies at the University of Heidelberg, Fromm was introduced by Reichmann...