No nation can give itself liberty if it is not already free, for human influence extends only as far as existing rights have developed.
— Joseph de Maistre
This convergence of aims between the Left and oligarchy continues in regard to the deconstruction of race, family, and gender, all of which must become ‘fluid’ ‘social constructs’ to expand globalisation.
Where Marxism attacks the family on economic grounds as a ‘bourgeois institution’, the Critical Theorists and post-Freudians condemn the traditional ‘patriarchal marriage and patriarchal family’410 as the home of bourgeois sexual repression, and ipso facto of authoritarianism, leading to Fascism,411 as Wilhelm Reich stated it. According to the Critical Theorists, the exploitive system of capitalism rests upon sexual repression in the patriarchal family. From the revolutionary viewpoint, Reich states that ‘sexual inhibition alters the structure of the economically suppressed individual in such a manner that he thinks, feels and acts against his own material interests’.412 The family is the ‘central reactionary germ cell’ of the authoritarian state: ‘Since authoritarian society reproduces itself in the structure of the mass individual by means of the authoritarian family, it follows that political reaction must defend the authoritarian family as the basis of the state, of culture and of civilization’.413 Reich’s biographer Myron Sharaf wrote, ‘Reich also anticipated many recent social developments’.414
The Frankfurt Institute’s Erich Fromm proclaimed the emergence of the sovereign individual ‘liberated’ from the primary ties. However, this ‘freedom’ presented a problem that he and other Critical Theorists sought to resolve: The individual, cut off from the security and sense of place provided by traditional societies, which Fromm called ‘pre-individualistic’, so far from creating the freedom for what humanistic psychologists call ‘self-actualisation’, results in loss of meaning. Fromm, in preparing the ground for deconstruction, wrote of modern man and the new society that he and others were preparing ideologically:
This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man.415
Fromm and his colleagues were refugees from Hitlerism. The Critical Theorists were bothered by the hard-wired preferences for individuals to desire security more so than freedom, and would sooner turn to authoritarianism. Fromm et al. saw that Fascism sought to return man to his pre-modernist, pre-industrial state of organic community, where the individual finds meaning in duty to the greater whole. Such bonds were regarded by Fromm et al. as ‘tyranny’. The central question was,
that man, the more he gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an ‘individual’, has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world as destroy his freedom and the integrity of his individual self.416
The Critical Theorists, having arisen from the chaotic milieu of the Weimar Republic, presaged the New Left and what is today called ‘identity politics’. During the Weimar epoch, they witnessed how the masses turned to Hitler rather than enduring democratic chaos, and authoritarian states emerged throughout Europe and further afield.
Organic bonds (primary ties) would be deconstructed as historically passé and the resulting alienated individuals and minorities would be reconstructed with new identities while simultaneously allowing the individual to pursue self-actualisation through ‘spontaneity’ and ‘love for humanity’, as Fromm put it. Once these ‘progressive’ beings are liberated from the bonds of tradition, they will build ‘democracy’ under the guardianship of a technocratic and intellectual elite, where democratic debate would not be confused by the intrusion of contrary opinions. The road to self-actualisation, according to Fromm, was unity with the world ‘in the spontaneity of love and productive work’; a nebulous nirvana. ‘Productive work’ is not ‘spontaneous’ at any level, no matter how primitive the society. Even hunter-gatherers require organisation. However, this brave new world, as Aldous Huxley saw it in its inevitable dystopian reality, became the aim of the New Left in their narcotised stupor of ‘love and spontaneity’, interrupted by Charles Manson and Jim Jones.
To be ‘free’ in the traditional sense means to dwell in peace (Friede = peace), at a place, free from harm and danger, suitable for dwelling.417 Dwelling is ‘the basic character of Being’,418 which is an uncovering of what one is. Martin Heidegger predicated freedom on place and Being. While the Critical Theorists and humanistic psychologists sought ‘self-actualisation’ in the destruction of ‘primary ties’, for Heidegger ‘freedom now reveals itself as letting beings be’,419 whereby freedom is not a capricious inclination towards one direction or another,420 but requires a memory of what the essence of things are. Heidegger contrasted this with the modernist impulsion to conceal the nature of Being by forgetfulness, where ‘historical-man is left to his own resources’, taking his own standards while ‘forgetting being as a whole’, continually supplying himself with ‘new standards, yet without considering either the ground for taking up standards or the essence of what gives the standard’.421 This forgetfulness is a ‘constant erring’.422 Modernism demands forgetfulness as the path to ‘self-actualisation’, and the destruction of all that binds; firstly of the family, which implies continuity and stability, then the ‘forgetting’ of all traditions. Since these traditions and primary ties bind the individual to a sense of place and of roots, they are regarded by Critical Theory as repressing individual freedom and spontaneity. There is an abyss between security and total freedom, which few want to traverse. When pushed towards this unbound freedom, the individual, according to Critical Theory, prefers to resort to authoritarianism, such as Fascism. This process is what Fromm called an ‘escape from freedom’.
Martin Heidegger, the philosopher who taught Marcuse and others who went left, countered that this detached individualism is an escape from meaning and belonging. After 1945, Heidegger was blacklisted by democracy as ideologically suspect. The problems of alienation and lack of meaning in industrial society that Fromm sought to address, the danger of modern man wanting to ‘escape from freedom’ and from his ‘awareness and conception of himself as an independent and separate being’,423 were addressed by Heidegger. He considered modern, industrialised, urbanised man to be enframed, to have been engulfed by an outlook that prevents the revealing of who he is. This enframing has existed prior to industrial society, but technology and industry block the path to Being.
For Fromm, ‘[t]here is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual....’424
Fromm adapted the dialectical approach to history from Marx, but rather than class, the historical process had been one of widening individualism from the time of the Reformation. Many sought ‘escape from freedom’, and the insecurity individual freedom entails, by embracing the paternal authority of Fascism, which had once been provided by the Church and the feudal order. Here Fromm writes of ‘modern history’ (sic). Like Marx and other social theorists, typical of the 19th century and after, he sees humanity marching in a ‘progressive’, lineal ascent from ‘primitive to modern’. While the Critical Theorists claim to have rejected positivism, whose most famous exponent, Auguste Comte, coined the word sociology, they were within the same historical school. From the time of the Reformation, which was the birth of the West’s ‘modern’ epoch, Fromm sees the start of the process where the individual becomes aware of himself and detached from communal ties, as a child matures to become detached from biological dependence on the mother.425 The mission of the ‘modern’ epoch is to continue the process of cutting the individual from the organic identity that existed prior to the Reformation, where the individual found meaning in guild, village, family, and Church, craft and land. It is during this pre-Reformation epoch that could be found the organic ‘freedom’ referred to by Heidegger in its primordial meaning.
According to Fromm, this organic sense of purpose is a primitive trait that needs replacing by the ‘modern’: that is the meaning of modernist ‘freedom’ according to the Critical Theorists and other positivists, whether socialist or capitalist. This is the ego-driven ‘freedom’ that became the battle cry of the 1960s New Left : the ‘freedom’ that has fractured society from the time of the Reformation, heralding the individualism of the bourgeois and the rise of the oligarchy. For Fromm, dialectically this was a necessary part of the historical process:
To the degree to which the individual, figuratively speaking, has not yet completely severed the umbilical cord which fastens him to the outside world, he lacks freedom; but these ties give him security and a feeling of belonging and of being rooted somewhere. I wish to call these ties that exist before the process of individuation has resulted in the complete emergence of an individual, ‘primary ties’.426
Here Fromm introduces his concept of primary ties. This is the most important concept, because it is here that Fromm and the Critical Theorists sought to deconstruct Western civilisation. Fromm explicitly calls these primary ties ‘organic’, and that is an essential factor in rightist analysis: the foundations of traditional society, and the traditional view of history are organic; it is the organic that the Right seeks to restore. The ‘progressive’ aims to obliterate the organic community (Gemeinschaft in sociological terms), and fracture the primary ties that bond that community.
Fromm saw in the child a temporary phase from which to be liberated and in which self-actualisation would progress beyond the primary ties. He states of these primary ties that they are the barrier to the next stage in human ‘evolution’.
They are organic in the sense that they are a part of normal human development; they imply a lack of individuality, but they also give security and orientation to the individual. They are the ties that connect the child with its mother, the member of a primitive community with his clan and nature, or the medieval man with the Church and his social caste. Once the stage of complete individuation is reached and the individual is free from these primary ties, he is confronted with a new task: to orient and root himself in the world and to find security in other ways than those which were characteristic of his preindividualistic existence. Freedom then has a different meaning.427
Fromm’s doctrine of liberation from anything of duration, giving the individual total freedom to deconstruct and reconstruct himself without restraint, seeded today’s doctrine of the fluidity of everything, where gender, race and family are social constructs. Nothing need bind, nothing need endure, nothing need be anchored by tradition, custom, law, religion or morality. This is the dichotomy of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, sociological terms coined in the late 19th century to distinguish the traditional pre-capitalist organic community from the rise of the contractual society.
The Right revolts against the modernist notion that nations and states are formed by declarations, constitutions, and legal contracts between citizens, such as formed the USA on the basis of a written Constitution; the French Republic on the basis of the ‘Declaration on the Rights of Man & the Citizen’, and the present notion that a world order can be formed on the basis of the United Nations Charter, U.N. Declaration on Human Rights, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and multiple other haughty pronouncements. Such contractual projects are designed to reconstruct the individual as a ‘citizen’ of a liberal state and more latterly as a ‘citizen of the world’, based on agreed legal rights; the 18th century doctrine of the ‘social contract’ and of the ‘general will’ formulated by Rousseau. This is what Fromm described as a ‘different meaning of freedom’, and as finding ‘security in other ways than those which were characteristic of his preindividualistic existence’.
Comparison of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
Gemeinschaft Relationships |
Gesellschaft Relationships |
Personal |
Impersonal |
Informal |
Formal and contractual |
Intimate and familiar |
Task-specific |
Traditional |
Utilitarian |
Sentimental |
Realistic |
Emphasis on ascribed statuses |
Emphasis on achieved statuses |
Less tolerance to deviance |
Greater tolerance to deviance |
Holistic relationships |
Segmental (partial) relationships |
Long duration |
Transient and fragmented |
Relatively limited social change |
Very evident social change |
Predominance of informal social control |
Greater formal social control |
We-feeling |
They-feeling |
Typifies rural life |
Typifies urban life |
For the Right then, a constitution forming a state is organic, and it is unwritten. It is firstly an ethos rooted in tradition. Whatever changes are made are the result of growth, not upheaval. An organic constitution which maintains the health and guides the limits of growth of the Gemeinschaft is not a proclamation of rules agreed by majority vote and announced by a parliamentary assembly of lawyers like a commercial contract. Hence, the Comte Joseph de Maistre, in the aftermath of the epochally destructive Jacobin Revolution in his country, defined the growth of the organic (‘natural’) constitution:
No constitution arises from deliberation. The rights of the people are never written, except as simple restatements of previous, unwritten rights. … Although written laws are merely the declarations of pre-existing laws, it is far from true that all these laws can be written. … The more of it one puts into writing, the weaker the institution becomes. … No nation can give itself liberty if it is not already free, for human influence extends only as far as existing rights have developed. … There never existed a free nation which did not have seeds of liberty as old as itself in its natural constitution. … Nor has any nation ever successfully attempted to develop, by its fundamental written laws, rights other than those which existed in its natural constitution. … One of the greatest errors of a century which professed them all was to believe that a political constitution could be created and written a priori, whereas reason and experience unite in proving that a constitution is a divine work and that precisely the most fundamental and essentially constitutional of a nation’s laws could not possibly be written. …
Promises, contracts, and oaths are mere words. It is as easy to break this trifling bond as to make it. Without the doctrine of a Divine Legislator, all moral obligation becomes illusory. Power on one side, weakness on the other: this constitutes all the bonds of human societies.
The codifiers of Roman law unpretentiously inserted a remarkable fragment of Greek jurisprudence in the first chapter of their collection. Among the laws which govern us, it says, some are written and others are not. Nothing could be more simple and yet more profound. …428
In the comparative chart (above) on Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft can be seen the differences in outlook between the traditional and the modernist, where the modernist is contractual, utilitarian, transient, fragmented, held together by means of ‘formal social controls’. Gemeinschaft means freedom of group association, upheld by custom and tradition; Gesellschaft means the individual beholden to a theoretical social contract in the name of ‘liberty’, formerly upheld by the guillotine and firing squad, and now by the technocratic methods of social control. One means Right, the other means Left.
While Fromm refers to individuation, the concept was explained in a contrary manner by Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology. Jungian individuation proceeds from what is inborn, rather than being cut off. Again it is an organic approach. Individuation is ‘inherited possibilities’, Jung wrote. Where for the Critical Theorists self-actualisation requires revolt, both individually against one’s family and collectively against ‘society’, Jung countered that individuation is a process that unfolds organically. The primary ties, far from suppressing individual growth, provide the sustenance: ‘Insofar as this process [individuation], as a rule, runs its course unconsciously as it has from time immemorial, it means no more than that the acorn becomes an oak, the calf a cow, and the child an adult’.429 It is a conception that accords with Heidegger’s unfolding of ‘Being’; ‘to let be’.
A few consciously strive for individuation in the sense of Nietzsche’s sublimation of instincts, or psychisation as Jung called it, but for most it is an organic unfolding of life; one does not need to be in existential crisis against one’s parents or homeland. ‘Individuation is just ordinary life and what you are made conscious of’, said Jung.430 Jung wrote of this innate creativity:
It is in my view a great mistake to suppose that the psyche of a new-born child is a tabula rasa in the sense that there is absolutely nothing in it. In so far as the child is born with a differentiated brain that is predetermined by heredity and therefore individualized, it meets sensory stimuli coming from outside not with any aptitudes, but with specific ones, and this necessarily results in a particular, individual choice and pattern of apperception. These aptitudes can be shown to be inherited instincts and preformed patterns, the latter being the a priori and formal conditions of apperception that are based on instinct. Their presence gives the world of the child and the dreamer its anthropomorphic stamp. They are the archetypes, which direct all fantasy activity into its appointed paths and in this way produce, in the fantasy-images of children’s dreams as well as in the delusions of schizophrenia, astonishing mythological parallels such as can also be found, though in lesser degree, in the dreams of normal persons and neurotics. It is not, therefore, a question of inherited ideas but of inherited possibilities of ideas.431
Where Fromm saw the ‘primary ties’ as the continuation of an infantile dependency of the individual, Jung saw in the infant the presence of all the instincts and experiences of his ancestors over millennia, from where potentialities arise. This is not something from which to be dissociated, but to be integrated into the total personality; the process of individuation in the Jungian sense. Here is the difference between Jung’s individuation, and that of the Critical Theorists. The first means integration, the second means fracture. The meaning of Critical Theory is to facture: the individual and society in the name of an unbound freedom. Of the beginnings of this individuating process from childhood, Jung stated:
Childhood is important not only because various warpings of instinct have their origin there, but because this is the time when, terrifying or encouraging, those far-seeing dreams and images appear before the soul of the child, shaping his whole destiny, as well as those retrospective intuitions which reach back far beyond the range of childhood experience into the life of our ancestors.432
This is what the modernist zealots for the autonomous individual seek to break in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘self-actualisation’, according to their preconceptions of such abstractions, ‘blinded’ by what Jung called ‘the garish conceits of enlightenment’.433 Jung warned that in breaking the bonds and instincts conveyed through untold generations, ‘Disalliance with the unconscious is synonymous with loss of instinct and rootlessness’.434
The progressive states that individuation, or ‘self-actualisation’, as the fad became known in humanistic psychology, can only be gained by breaking ‘free’ from ties that restrict the ego. Jung to the contrary, said that individuation must flower from one’s primordial rootedness: ‘Individuation is only possible with people, through people. You must realise that you are a link in a chain, that you are not an electron suspended somewhere in space or aimlessly drifting through the cosmos’.435 The path to individuation, to authentic self-actualisation, to the uncovering of one’s Being, is through a consciousness of the self as part of something greater. Where Fromm and the ‘progressives’ can see only restriction, Jung sees potential: ‘Individuation is not that you become an ego—you would then become an individualist. You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed in individuating; he is a philosophically distilled egotist’.436 Individuation is not ‘individualisation’, ‘but a conscious realisation of everything the existence of an individual implies: his needs, his tasks, his duties, his responsibilities, etc.’437 ‘Individuation does not isolate, it connects’.438
While Fromm talked of the detached individual somehow recombining with the entirety of humanity through a new social consciousness, Jung did not proceed from the notion that the individual must be first detached from bonds, but rather that he grows out of such bonds: ‘You see as the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense relationships and not to isolation’.439 Jung refers to the necessity of identification with ‘collective norms’ as a prerequisite for individuation: ‘Before [individuation] can be taken as a goal, the educational aim of adaptation to the necessary minimum of collective norms must first be attained. If a plant is to unfold its specific nature to the full, it must first be able to grow in the soil in which it is planted’.440
The Critical Theorists advocate a process of ‘deconstruction’441 that must proceed before the world can be reconstituted. But Fromm warns that it is a dangerous course because ‘freedom’ can only be gained by cutting loose from all that is familiar and by leaping into an abyss where self-destruction rather than utopia might await. In particular, the Critical Theorists fear that individuals might choose en masse the ‘security’ of Fascism (said to be the authority of the father-figure) rather than a rootless ‘freedom’. Yet if one reaches the other side, what awaits in a world of unbounded universal freedom is to live ‘spontaneously’.
There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual. However, if the economic, social and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.442
Fromm is warning that ‘freedom’ can only be had if society is revolutionised by destroying the ‘primary ties’. A falling into the abyss can result in madness, which Wilhelm Reich sought to examine in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, and Horkheimer, Adorno et al., sought to measure in The Authoritarian Personality. Fromm and his colleagues stated that if the aspirant fails and madness ensues, it is the fault of society. The masses are therefore prone to flee from freedom, and return to what is ordered and secure, which for Critical Theorists is the meaning of ‘Fascism’. Yet for Jung, individuation is to be had in a manner that is precisely the contrary of that of the post-Marxists, where the primary ties so far from restraining individuation are the organic and timeless predicates from which individuation grows.