The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet

The context for Escape from Freedom was exceedingly personal and complex. Although Fromm’s work at the Frankfurt Institute contributed to his most important ideas, the intellectual stimulation, collegiality, and joy Fromm found with Horney, Sullivan, Thompson, and their colleagues in the Zodiac group and Culture and Personality movement was also significant. The way Katherine Dunham came to embody the richness, creative potential, and happiness inherent in freedom also played an important role in the book’s creation. Fromm’s preoccupation with the rescue of family members and others from a Holocaust in the making as he conceived and completed Escape indicates that much of his daily life was deeply embedded in the fabric of the book. Without this complex and changing context, there could not have been such a rich and historically significant text.

In March 1939, Fromm gave his friend and analysand, the Columbia sociologist Robert Lynd, a detailed outline of Escape from Freedom. He explained to Lynd “the theme which is nearest to my heart and which is the leitmotif of the book is the problem of freedom and anxiety or the fear of freedom or the escape from freedom.” When

It was an arresting volume. Fromm’s narrative line was consistently crisp and animated, and the book could be read in a few sittings. Fromm avoided the heavy footnoting and nuanced argumentation of most of his previous publications. Conveying few hints that German was his native language, he was out to communicate with a general and international, if primarily American, readership. Although he stated his differences with Freud, he presumed that the reader had no knowledge of psychoanalytic theory or social psychology and confined the elaboration of his concept of social character to an appendix essay. Fromm also announced that Escape was only the first of several anticipated volumes and invited his audience to read the others. He planned a subsequent book on the nature of ethics (Man for Himself) and another amplifying the social psychology of destructiveness (The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness).

For Escape, Fromm emphasized that he would draw largely on dated, though well-known, secondary sources such as Johan Huizinga and Jacob Burckhardt on the decline of the Middle Ages and the dawn of the Renaissance. He directly quoted from Luther and Calvin to articulate the ideologies that shaped Reformation-era Europe. Although Fromm was dependent on the works of Max Weber and R. H. Tawney, to say nothing of Marx, in explaining the connection between early Protestantism and the rise of capitalism, he did not weigh his readers down with complex and subtle lines of argumentation. Fromm openly acknowledged that he was advancing only the most cursory summary of factors prompting the Nazi rise to power and was drawing heavily from Mein Kampf to explain Hitler. More generally, as a free-ranging social commentator rather than a psychoanalyst, an interdisciplinary scholar, or a historian, he wrote an exciting and readily understandable volume for a large general readership, conveying his concerns about the current threats to human freedom. He was intent to convey a broad and deeply important argument and eschewed the imperatives of a specialized investigator. Although he had no plans to cease his clinical work and psychoanalytic supervision or depart from the world of scholarship, the process of completing Escape decidedly modified his sense of vocation and made him a generalist.

This contemporary crisis over freedom compelled Fromm to put aside a study of the “character structure of modern man.” The crisis threatened “the greatest achievements of modern culture—individuality and uniqueness of personality.” These achievements had been augmented through the positive use of the “freedom to,” that is, the ability to act autonomously to fulfill life’s purpose, including the ability to act ethically and creatively. The spread of totalitarianism, particularly the Nazi variety, subverted this positive freedom of the individual. It also subverted negative freedom—the “freedom from,” which refers to the absence of coercions, obstacles, or restraints on the individual. Democratic societies were especially under siege and could forfeit both negative and positive freedom by conforming to the mandates of the powerful. Fromm insisted that the primary battle for the integrity of the self was not only against totalitarian states; it was also “within ourselves and our institutions.” These were the book’s most essential points.3

The struggle between freedom and conformist escapism represented an existential dilemma for humankind, Fromm insisted. Because Freud more often than not characterized the human drama in terms of the satisfaction or frustration of biologically rooted instinctual drives, Fromm argued that psychoanalytic orthodoxy fell short of addressing the problem. He did not elaborate extensively, as he had in earlier publications, on his growing departure from Freudian drive theory and its modernist agenda or on his shift toward a concept of social character, in which the instincts were given their ultimate form and function through social and economic conditions: “Human nature is neither a biologically fixed and innate sum total of drives nor is it a lifeless shadow of cultural patterns to which it adapts itself smoothly; it is the product of human evolution, but it also has certain inherent mechanisms and laws.” As man evolved, he lost his instinctually based feelings of oneness or connectedness with humankind and nature. (It is interesting that Fromm did not avail himself here of Darwin’s observations that man had shed much of the instinctual disposition that persisted in less evolved animals.) One became an independent, rational, self-sustaining individual, Fromm observed, but also a more isolated, lonely, and anxious person who needed desperately to feel “related to the world outside oneself.” In this regard, Fromm underscored Harry Stack Sullivan’s interpersonal psychology to explain the importance to modern man of regaining a feeling of relatedness to others and to the world. He emphasized Karen Horney’s understanding of the paralyzing nature of the anxiety that was rooted in the individuality that characterized modern society. Fromm also found value in the writings of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, John Dollard, Edward Sapir, and others within the Culture and Personality movement. Their work attested to the fact that the modern individual was a dynamic actor in a social and cultural setting.⁴

Roughly a hundred pages into Escape, Fromm offered the most explicit statement of his primary thesis: “Our aim will be to show that the structure of modern society affects man in two ways simultaneously: he becomes more independent, self-reliant, and critical, and he becomes more isolated, alone, and afraid.” How could man utilize his newfound sense of individuality and freedom positively so that he reengaged the world and thereby curtailed his sense of fear, isolation, and loneliness? Fromm’s answer was vague: the primary task for the modern self was to use one’s freedom spontaneously, energetically, and uniquely through acts that would enhance his joy, his sense of viable selfhood, and his capacity to share with others. Alternatively, he could seek to cure his loneliness by subordinating himself to authority and custom through deference and conformity. How, Fromm asked, did the modern self arrive at this dilemma of apprehensiveness over newfound individuality and a crisis over whether to overcome the apprehension through positive freedom, that is, through autonomous, purposeful and ethical behavior?5

Escape characterized the origins of individuation as occurring on two levels: one was endemic to all newborns, and the other was the product of broader historical and cultural forces. Early in his life, the infant became an individual. Although he ceased to be fetal at birth and became independent of his mother’s body with the cutting of the umbilical cord, he continued to be wholly dependent on his mother. Gradually, however, he came to regard the mother and other objects as units apart from himself. Through neurological and physical development, the infant came to grasp and master, both physically and intellectually, the diverse physical and conceptual entities external to him. He started to develop a distinction between “I” and “thou.” Yet it took years before he entirely separated himself from others and fully regarded parental or any other authority as distinct from him. He grew stronger physically, emotionally, and mentally, and these elements of growth slowly emerged as an organized and integrated personality—the self. That is, as the primary ties of infancy receded in the face of individuation, “the growth of self-strength” proceeded.⁶

Whereas animals lower on the developmental scale were dominated since birth by instinctive and reflexive neurological mechanisms, the human being was the highest animal, developmentally speaking. (Again, it is curious that Fromm did not explicitly cite Darwin to advance this premise.) Man’s relative freedom from instinctual determination as he grew, Fromm explained, meant that through cognitive development and learning, he gained increasing freedom in a positive sense. Man was able to determine his destiny and separate himself from nature: “Just as a child can never return to the mother’s womb physically, so it can never reverse, psychically, the process of individuation.” To be sure, Fromm argued, as individuation proceeded and the child gained a sense of integrated selfhood, the child also hoped to escape a disturbing sense of loneliness inherent in being an individual and thus sometimes sought to escape this sense of aloneness by submitting once again to parental and other authorities, especially if he has not developed the inner strength and productivity that would lead to solidarity with others. This submission might give the child a temporary sense of security and connectedness to others. “But unconsciously the child realizes the price it pays is giving up strength and the integrity of the self. Thus the result of submission is the very opposite of what it was to be: submission increases the child’s insecurity and at the same time creates hostility and rebelliousness.” Fromm concluded his narrative by reiterating that a child moved away from the primary ties of parents and nature and became an individuated self in order to gain contentment and to exercise his full freedom and independence.7

Though early in Escape from Freedom Fromm maintained that human nature was not fixed but infinitely malleable, he was describing an early developmental process that all children purportedly experienced. This universalist postulate made Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and his other anthropologist friends uneasy; they noted that there were too many variations in the way children developed in different societies for there to be a single process endemic to the human condition. Fromm left their observations unanswered. Once a child became individuated, according to Fromm, he knew that he could only enhance his sense of selfhood and enjoy lasting contentment by embracing and extending his freedom and not by submitting to authority. Once more, Fromm was making a universalist assumption. His friends among the “culturists” and neo-Freudians retorted that specific societies, cultures, and historical forces affected the level of individual anxiety and loneliness, making that level quite variable. In some circumstances, the anxiety and loneliness were so intense that a child had little initial disposition to embrace freedom. Pressed on this score, Fromm only partially yielded and provided few concrete examples.

Relying heavily on Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) rather than Max Weber to characterize this transition, Fromm described how the emergence of capitalism seriously altered this medieval order. During the late Middle Ages and spreading from Italy to Central and Western Europe, there arose a new moneyed class, which was “filled with a spirit of initiative, power, [and] ambition” but without the traditional privileges of birth and inherited status.⁹

According to Fromm, this class actively engaged in trade and industry around the Mediterranean world and into the Orient. Their success testified to the importance of self-agency and acquired wealth. During the Renaissance, they became a prosperous and powerful upper class whose economic activity and newfound prosperity promoted the view that the free individual could change his station in life—if sometimes his sense of social isolation as well. Although small artisans and the petit bourgeoisie rarely shared in this wealth and were sometimes victimized, a “growing competitive struggle for self-advancement” marked the beginning of capitalism.¹⁰

With it came the first signs of the birth of the modern individual, who had agency and opportunities but no durable place in the community. In a footnote but not in his primary narrative, Fromm acknowledged that his distinction between the cohesion and stratification of medieval society and the individualism, acquisitiveness, and comparative social isolation of Renaissance capitalism represented “ideal types”—abstractions that did not comport with the complex lives of the historical actors. In fact, the economic and social forces of early capitalism “had already developed within medieval society of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries,” and, in addition, elements of medieval society actually continued into the modern era.11

Fromm was so intent on presenting this larger picture of historical change that he largely dismissed the qualifications of professional historians. In a less-than-appropriate polemic, Fromm reduced professional historical research “to the gathering of countless details” shorn of interpretation. When his friend Thomas Merton, the Catholic theologian, cautioned him against an overly positive and one-dimensional picture of the Middle Ages, one shorn of qualification and nuance, Fromm gave little ground. He simply acknowledged that he may have overreacted to the very negative attitude toward the medieval era “conveyed to me in the first twenty years of my life.” Fromm also felt that significant historical qualification would have weighed down a narrative that he wanted to flow vigorously and with very distinctive signposts for a general reader. The tradeoff was that professional historians have felt that Escape from Freedom does not comport with the demands of their craft.

Drawing conceptually from Max Weber and R. H. Tawney—without acknowledging the fullness of his debt to them—Fromm linked early capitalism to religion to explain the rise of the sense of individuality. But as a serious Marxist, he emphasized a class distinction. Early capitalism justified the competitive and acquisitive habits of individuals belonging to a new moneyed class, a class that felt sustained in its newfound individuality and economic power by the celebration of selfhood and dignity inherent in Renaissance art, music, and literature. The new wealthy also felt supported by late medieval Catholicism, which stressed human dignity and man’s right to be confident of God’s love within the structure of the church. The emerging sense of individuality among wealthy merchants and industrialists also promoted feelings of loneliness and isolation, but they were ameliorated by the celebration of the self and the benefits of human effort within Renaissance culture and within the late medieval church.¹²

In contrast, early Protestantism appealed to the urban middle and lower classes and to peasants who, under emerging capitalism, had lost the protections and sense of secure social structure inherent in medieval society. This was the cost of being free and autonomous in the new capitalist marketplace. With few exceptions, they felt exploited by the new moneyed elite and trapped in an economic and social freefall. More than anyone else, Luther addressed this sense of powerlessness, anxiety, and insecurity by preaching to his constituency that man was free from the authority of the Catholic Church and its attendant institutional arrangements. However, this did not mean that these desperate people could exercise self-agency and create happier lives for themselves. Quite the opposite. For Luther, man was inherently evil and inconsequential in the larger universe. He could only find contentment and salvation if he totally relinquished any sense of selfhood and submitted entirely to the grace of God. Only when man demolished his individual will and his sense of agency could he find comfort and salvation, even though his inherently evil nature would never wholly disappear. Fromm characterized Luther’s demand as very problematic and only a temporary palliative for doubt and anxiety, because, at base, man had to deploy his own agency (not God’s) and forge a stable and happy rapport with society. Still, Fromm acknowledged that Luther’s appeal for relief and certainty through total submission to God plus deference to constituted authority attracted a massive following. Protestantism, Fromm noted with disapprobation, essentially demanded an escape from freedom.

As he characterized Luther, Fromm referenced Hitler and other contemporary dictators who also sought the destruction of individual agency. Luther purportedly offered “a solution which had much in common with the principle of complete submission of the individual to the state and the ‘leader.’” This was not the Luther portrayed by Reformation scholars. The twentieth-century counterpart to sixteenth-century Lutheranism was “the Fascist emphasis that it is the aim of life to be sacrificed for ‘higher’ powers, for the leader of the racial community.” Clearly, Fromm was taking excessive liberties with the historical contexts not only of two very different centuries but with the substantial historical interval between them. Indeed, his suggestion of a direct road from Luther to Hitler was problematic at best. But Fromm was writing less as a historian than as a social philosopher or commentator out to advance a general argument. He used history to explain, through narrative, why he felt the world was becoming increasingly enslaved. Given Fromm’s efforts to help Heinz Brandt, Sophie Engländer, and others in a family being brutalized by Hitler, there may also have been a profoundly personal dimension here.13

There was also Calvin of Geneva to reckon with in describing the way early Protestantism responded to the insecurities of postmedieval individuality. Fromm maintained that Calvin, like Luther, appealed to artisans, the middle classes, and to small businessmen who felt threatened and exploited by emergent capitalism. Calvin’s God, even more than Luther’s, was a tyrant who predestined some for grace and others for eternal damnation wholly at whim. Men were basically unequal—the saved and the damned. In a profoundly unhistorical jump to Third Reich racial hierarchy, Fromm asserted that Calvinism had “found its most vigorous revival in Nazi ideology,” with its racial differentiation between Aryans and “lesser” peoples. But since only God really knew who was saved, the man who hoped to be of the elect had to put forth enormous effort in his everyday work and in being frugal—possible outer signs or forecasts of inner grace—to distinguish himself in God’s eyes. That is, Calvinism promoted vigorous and relentless labor by instilling a compulsion to work and to save as virtues in themselves. For Fromm—promoting Max Weber’s perspective—early capitalism found no better ally than Calvinist man because he was driven not by societal coercion but by inner compulsions to be busy, to labor, and to renounce earthly extravagance, all in the hopes of easing acute insecurity over his selection as one of God’s chosen.14

At base, Fromm argued that in both its Lutheran and Calvinist manifestations, Protestantism served as the answer for the frightened, isolated, and uprooted of the marginal middle class and artisan class. By relinquishing their sense of viable selfhood to a tyrannical God, deferring to established power, and feeling compelled to work and be thrifty, Protestantism provided laborers with a new character structure to fit into a capitalist economic order. Under capitalism, one ceased to live “in a closed world the center of which was man.” Instead, man was dominated by suprapersonal forces of capital and markets; he lost his sense of unity with his society and his sense of a place in the universe. Protestantism reinforced these feelings of insignificance. It “destroyed the confidence of man in God’s unconditional love; it taught man to despise and distrust himself and others” congruent with the new competitive economic order. Together, Protestantism and capitalism forged a character structure consisting of a “compulsion to work, passion for thrift, the readiness to make one’s life a tool for the purposes of an [external] personal power, asceticism, and a compulsive sense of duty.” As he became a tool of capital expansion and of an arbitrary all-powerful God, man lost a sense of himself as a unique entity with agency and dignity. The Protestantism of early modern Europe became the roots of modern authoritarianism—a road from Luther and Calvin to Hitler that was oversimplified, to say the least.15

Fromm had not only folded Max Weber’s and R. H. Tawney’s interpretations of the interlocking nature of early Protestantism and early capitalism into his narrative on the emergence of the modern self. He had also been influenced by Kierkegaard’s insight on the emergence of “the isolation of the individual” during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Indeed, Fromm acknowledged that many probing thinkers had preceded him in his delineation of “the problem.” Several reviewers expert on early Protestantism felt that Fromm had overemphasized if not outright distorted how Luther and Calvin and their followers deflated the sense of selfhood and community and encouraged conformity. In response, Fromm acknowledged that there were other dimensions to early Protestantism, but scholars generally refused to let him off the hook for his insisting on the reenactment in the twentieth century of particular historical developments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nevertheless, Fromm’s ahistorical representations of the late medieval and early modern eras engaged the present and even spoke to the general human psychological condition. Seventeen years before Erik Erikson published Young Man Luther (1958), Fromm merged psychology and history, though his psychology outshone his history. He explored the human psyche and the problem of freedom, past and present, in a thrilling but significantly overstated dialogue. There is little doubt why, by the 1960s, the preponderance of serious students of Clio’s craft who called themselves “psychohistorians” would cite Erikson rather than Fromm as the founder of their field.¹⁶

To underscore the challenge to modern society, Fromm initially intended to title the manuscript Selfishness and Self-Love. In fact, he published an article on the topic in a 1939 issue of Psychiatry and subsequently turned it into one of the thematic lines of Escape. For centuries, “don’t be selfish” had been a stock phrase, urging attentiveness to others and to other causes, the purpose of the admonition being to advance charity and philanthropy. To love others was a virtue, but to love oneself was sinful and excessive. For Fromm, quite the opposite was the case. It was essential to grasp the opportunities since the Renaissance and Reformation for newfound freedom; Fromm insisted that self-love and self-regard were imperative. One must love oneself—to affirm one’s unique life, happiness, emotionality, growth, and freedom—in order to convey love and regard for others. That is, to have genuine regard for the well-being of another, one needed a sense of love and positive affirmation of oneself. One could not give to another what one did not possess. Citing Harry Stack Sullivan, Fromm insisted that one could not give genuine affection to a lover unless one had positive feelings about oneself.17

Contrary to Calvin and Luther, therefore, Fromm insisted that the self must never be subordinated to any cause and that subservience would disguise and weaken the true self, which would lead to greed, narcissism, and selfishness. Selfishness not only deprived a person of his freedom but also of his self-regard—indeed, his very humanity. Fromm insisted this self-depletion was the real meaning of selfishness and even narcissism:

It was through this distinction between self-love and selfishness that Fromm was able to explain the negative effects of Protestantism on man’s longing for freedom and the psychological effects of the rise of monopoly capitalism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that spawned the problematic mass society. Although few commentators on Escape from Freedom have made the point, this section of Fromm’s narrative anticipated many of the seminal studies offered in the decades after World War II about the self-depleting qualities of modern monopoly capitalism.

To discuss the crisis of mass society, Fromm offered only sketchy outlines of its historical development, noting that post-Reformation historical change yielded a modern individual who became “more independent, self-reliant, and critical” but also “more isolated, alone, and afraid.” He argued that political restraints on the self fell by the wayside with revolutions in England, France, and America. The modern democratic state emerged based upon representative government and equal rights under law. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion arrived as the old coercive powers of church and state over the individual dissipated.¹⁹

However, “new enemies of a different nature have arisen; enemies which are not essentially external restraints, but internal factors blocking the full realization of the freedom of personality.” Under monopoly capitalism, one became associated increasingly with large impersonal organizations and processes that demanded what Fromm called “automaton conformity.” Much of what modern man “thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says.” Feelings and thoughts emanating from structures outside the self were falsely experienced as one’s own.20

Fromm did not detail how the large impersonal corporations and other organizations, which were owned increasingly by elite monopoly capitalists, originated and began to demand “automaton conformity” of the worker under conditions of mass production and mass distribution of goods and services. He asserted that—but did not describe how—modern man had “been turned into a cog, sometimes small, sometimes larger, of a machinery which forces its tempo upon him, which he cannot control, and in comparison with which he is utterly insignificant.” Fromm essentially abridged several centuries of history on the development of corporate organizations and attendant technologies into a discussion of the rise of “automaton conformity.” Consequently, he asserted—but did not explain—how the isolated individual, reduced by the “self-compression” of early Protestantism but enhanced by the democratic political revolutions that followed, became a conformist “cog” caught in the corporate forms of monopoly capitalism.²¹

Fromm’s characterization of modern man as a powerless “cog” in a large corporate organization demanding “automaton conformity” drew heavily from Weber. Although in general he was discussing “modern society,” the focus was on America. Whereas the artisan and craftsman of old shaped his product as an extension of himself, the modern worker assembled a small portion of a larger product within a massive organization that cared only for profits. Estranged from the fruits of his work, the manual laborer was prized only for his physical energy on the assembly line, and the white-collar and professional workers were relevant only for their specialized knowledge. Workers generally understood that they would be “mercilessly fired” if they did not contribute to organizational profits. As the Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills noted a decade later in his classic White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951), work under monopoly capitalism had become alienating and self-deprecating.²²

Not only did Escape from Freedom anticipate Mills on the alienating nature of modern labor, but Fromm also anticipated William Whyte’s seminal The Organization Man (1956). “In the smaller enterprise of the old days,” Fromm emphasized, “the worker knew his boss personally” and where he stood. But there was no such familiarity in a mammoth corporate organization. Indeed, the boss had been replaced by the anonymous power of “management” and balance-sheet considerations. The labor union was the worker’s protection against “management,” providing a feeling of strength against the giant impersonal organization. The problem was that the labor union, too, was growing into a mammoth organization that militated against a worker’s active participation. Lacking ownership of the fruits of his labor, the modern worker felt alienated by the very nature of the modern workplace. Rather than enhance man’s innate creative capacities, the workplace demanded that he fit in as a steady, predictable “organization man.”23

In elaborating on mindless “automaton conformity,” Fromm anticipated the substantial and exciting postwar literature on consumer culture. In the small independent retail store of old, the owner knew the customer personally and received him as “somebody who mattered.” The proprietor was attentive to and respectful of the customer’s needs and desires, and the purchasing transaction enhanced the customer’s dignity and sense of importance. In contrast, a customer in a modern department store felt “small and unimportant” amid the profusion of commodities over a vast area and a large sales force that regarded the consumer as a depersonalized source of revenue. “There is nobody who is glad about his coming, nobody who is particularly concerned about his wishes.” Fromm added that whereas the proprietor in the small store used “rather rational and sensible” talk to induce the customer to buy a product, modern advertising tried “to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually.” Eschewing the qualities of the merchandise, modern advertising sought to “kill the critical capacities of the customer like an opiate or downright hypnosis.” Anticipating Vance Packard’s important study The Hidden Persuaders (1957), Fromm saw that products were marketed through subtle appeals to the consumer’s dreams, fears, and fantasies. Fromm also noted that a consumer movement had emerged “to restore the customer’s critical ability, dignity, and sense of significance” in the face of the gigantic consumer center and the dulling barrage of advertising, but that movement had “not grown beyond modest beginnings.”²⁴

In sum, Fromm insisted that the “style” of modern monopoly capitalism and corporate culture was smothering the individual with a sense of smallness and inconsequentiality. One felt compelled to “fall in step like a marching soldier or a worker on the endless belt.” An individual could act, “but the sense of independence, significance, has gone.” Instead, Fromm charged that a pseudoself replaced the individual, who had evolved into “a reflex of other people’s expectations of him.” One felt “compelled to conform, to seek his identity by continuous approval and recognition of others.” This was how all “feelings and thoughts can be induced from the outside and yet be subjectively experienced as one’s own” while unique beliefs and emotions were repressed and ceased to be part of one’s self. Fromm’s insights were intended to apply not only to twentieth-century fascist regimes but to democracies such as the United States.25

Within a decade of the publication of Escape from Freedom, David Riesman published The Lonely Crowd (1950), perhaps the most widely heralded of all the postwar studies in social psychology. He traced the shift over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from “inner direction,” where the individual sought guidance within his own unique values, memories, and experiences, to “other direction,” where one sought to conform to the dominant mores of the society around him (the “crowd”). Riesman readily acknowledged that his revolutionary concept of “other direction” rested heavily upon his friend and analyst Erich Fromm’s notion of the replacement of the integrated self with the “automaton conformist” and that it connected to Fromm’s related concept of a “marketing personality.”

There were major differences between The Lonely Crowd and Escape from Freedom. First, Riesman studied the “American national character,” and his research consisted almost entirely of U.S. materials. Second, there was chronology. Published in the shadows of the Holocaust and amid the fear and scare tactics of McCarthyism and the early Cold War, The Lonely Crowd was an “alarmist,” if cogently presented, exposé of postwar American culture. Riesman’s principal claim was that the country was endangered by a threat to viable selfhood and individuality. In contrast, Fromm published his work just before Hitler instituted “the final solution” and before even the outlines of the Cold War and McCarthyism were discernable. Fromm cast his net more broadly than Riesman by examining the advent of modern individuality that engendered freedoms but also the insecurities that tempted too many Westerners to relinquish their freedoms. Finally, Fromm found “automaton conformity” to be only one of three general psychological mechanisms—the other mechanisms were “authoritarianism” and human “destructiveness”—to offer escape from the challenges and insecurities of freedom. He felt that “automaton conformity” was the primary challenge not only for the United States but for other Western democracies. As the wave of tyranny swept through Hitler’s Germany, Fromm acknowledged that the other two mechanisms were just as likely in the right circumstances. Unlike The Lonely Crowd, Escape from Freedom addressed a considerably larger issue: the problem of freedom and its discontents. Prevalent in all Western societies, the democracies as well as the dictatorships, he insisted that this problem resided in the human condition.

For Fromm, “automaton conformity” was in some ways the most benign form of psychological escape. For if this conformity commingled with an “authoritarian” escape mechanism, then sadomasochism was the result. In his use of the term “sadomasochism,” Fromm did not mean neurosis or perversion but instead an attitude toward authority rooted in one’s social character: “He admires authority and tends to submit to it, but at the same time he wants to be an authority himself and have others submit to him.” As a masochist, the authoritarian individual loved and willingly submitted to the dictates of the strong. As a sadist, he sought to dominate the weak and make them suffer. That is, the sadomasochist authoritarian felt compelled to abandon his sparse and apprehensive sense of selfhood and his fear of being a free individual both by deferring to his “betters” in their noble cause and by quashing his “inferiors.” Believing “that life is determined by forces outside of man’s own self,” he could not comprehend the concepts of human equality or solidarity but only authoritarian notions of superior and inferior peoples. In this way, he hoped to participate in the glory and strength of a noble cause.26

Fromm insisted that the psychological basis of the Nazi appeal had been to this sadomasochistic authoritarian character and that Mein Kampf best illustrated these qualities in urging the German masses to participate in the strength and glory of the Reich and the purity of the Aryan blood line by degrading and ultimately eliminating “lesser” peoples. This was a very selective interpretation of the appeal of Mein Kampf. Fromm did not, for example, treat the intensity of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, choosing instead to locate the Jew with the communist and the Frenchman as examples of Hitler’s purportedly “lesser” groups. Nor did Fromm point to the discredited Social Darwinist premises behind the Nazi quest for Aryan purity. Like Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner and their perversion of Darwin’s theory of evolution decades earlier, Hitler insisted that the biological purity of the “superior race” would be accomplished through the elimination of “inferior” and “contaminated” peoples. Notwithstanding these observational shortcomings, it is interesting that in his 1950 classic, The Authoritarian Personality, Theodor Adorno gave credence to much of Fromm’s explanatory framework.27

Fromm believed that Nazi sadomasochism resonated psychologically far more with the lower middle class than with any other segment of German society. As such, he was not attentive to the notion of an authoritarian German national character or to the explanatory or rhetorical power of Nazi pseudoscience. Fromm’s focus was overwhelmingly on social class. The strongest heirs of Lutheran and Calvinist psychological austerities, suspicions, and joylessness, Fromm argued that the lower middle class had been hit heavily by post–World War I conditions—specifically the massive inflation and economic depression—while their prestige had fallen below that of the general working class. The Nazis successfully appealed to this troubled class above all others, Fromm maintained. He got it wrong. His hypothesis about the lower middle class has not held up. The Nazis gained votes from all classes. They were popular in rural Protestant areas and garnered significant working-class and upper-middle-class votes in the cities. Indeed, the lower middle class was less supportive of Hitler than was the upper middle class. As a general rule, the higher one was in the class structure, the greater the chances that one voted for Hitler. Yet this is retrospective and was determined using research techniques that Fromm lacked. He had only his German worker study to go on, and his conclusion about the lower middle class fit his sadomasochism hypothesis.²⁸

Fromm characterized “destructiveness” as an escape mechanism for authoritarians that usually blended with sadomasochism. Where sadomasochism represented a symbiotic relationship to the other (one’s superiors and inferiors), destructiveness eliminated the problematic other. Citing Karen Horney, Fromm noted that destructiveness was a common reaction to anxiety, one rooted in social isolation and a sense of powerlessness—that too many circumstances were outside one’s control. Those who resorted to destructiveness often led a very constricted emotional existence as they stored up multiple resentments for ultimate release: “The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.” Predictably and problematically, Fromm characterized the lower middle class as the primary agent for the escape mechanism of destructiveness within the Third Reich. As the heirs of Calvinism and its tenet of predestination, which denied human agency, they represented the most emotionally isolated and restricted class and harbored “intense envy against those who had the means to enjoy life.” If Fromm’s discussion of sadomasochism was abbreviated, he admitted that his characterization of destructiveness was downright skeletal. Toward the end of his career, he would devote a substantial book, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, to the concept.29

Fromm therefore framed his discussion of Nazism and other authoritarian nations around the escape mechanisms of sadomasochism and destructiveness. Additionally, Fromm acknowledged that Hitler and other high-level Nazis admired the powerful and were contemptuous of the powerless. Privately, they were especially scornful of the lower middle class. They sought power within the framework of symbiotic hierarchy: to dominate another, it was necessary to submit to those above and ultimately to the Fuehrer. This conscripted, constricted, authoritarian view of selfhood became the road to glory.³⁰

Fromm closed his book with a buoyant optimism that flew in the face of his dispiriting narrative. The “automaton conformity” of Western democracies, especially America, could be successfully managed. The United States had long enjoyed Bill of Rights guarantees and representative government, Fromm pointed out. Through the New Deal, America established the new economic principle that society was responsible for all of its constituents and that none should starve or fear for their loss of livelihood. What was needed was for the New Deal to go one step further: to promote a decentralized but “planned economy” of socialism—an economic democracy that would match the existing political democracy.³²

If Fromm’s optimistic prophecy for Western democracies (especially America) jarred against his analysis of conformity pressures, an upbeat prediction for Germany was incongruous with his analysis of the roots of Nazi authoritarianism. But once the Nazis were defeated, “the authoritarian systems cannot do away with the basic conditions that make for the quest for freedom; neither can they exterminate the quest for freedom that springs from these conditions.”³³

How does one account for Fromm’s prediction of the eventual spread of humanistic values, democracy, and freedom—almost as historical inevitabilities—at the close of a manuscript focusing relentlessly on the flight from freedom in the Western world? More explicitly, why had Fromm disrupted the tone of a rather hard-nosed narrative by postulating a faith in the eventual emergence of humanism? Why did he assume that people would choose lasting happiness and contentment by embracing spontaneous and creative forces inherent within themselves—that they would, in the future, be able to pursue the rational, constructive, life-enhancing choices inherent in being free individuals that they had so often rejected in the past?

Fromm’s answer was a proclamation of his deep faith in humanity. Four hundred years after the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of capitalism, there was no turning back to the medieval society that preceded the psychological birth of the individual. But authoritarianism and “automaton conformity” only offered temporary and self-deprecating answers for modern society’s insecurity and loneliness. In time, man would learn to exercise his freedom creatively in order to enhance his life and to cure his insecurities. Fromm’s problem was that he simply postulated this train of thought while the preponderance of his narrative suggested otherwise. The silver lining he provided at the end of Escape was an outbreak of exuberance in a volume on pathos.34

Fromm’s upbeat prediction that man would ultimately embrace rather than continue to turn away from freedom was postulated in universalist terms. This contradicted his developing concept of social character, which he amplified in an appendix essay. To address social character, one had to examine specific conditions and values in particular social groups and to allow for significant variations between them, which Fromm had often tried to do in his main narrative. Thomas Harvey Gill spoke for many reviewers when he wrote: “one wonders if a striving for a cultural concept like justice—which changes with time and geography—can be in itself a fundamental striving.” Indeed, Gill was critical of Fromm’s general premise that all sorts of “spontaneous ideals” resided in the self; for Gill, the premise was vague and lacked general utility.³⁵

Gill, Otto Fenichel, Victor White, and several other reviewers were distressed that Fromm’s upbeat prophecy, utopian in tone, seemed tacked on—the weakest part of Escape from Freedom. They insisted that this prophecy was no substitute for the sound use of history, psychology, and reasoned analysis. As an émigré psychoanalyst, Fenichel was especially critical, rebuking Fromm for inadequate research and for misreading Freud. What Fenichel meant, of course, was that Fromm had almost totally broken from Freud’s “modernist” agenda rooted in the centrality of libidinal drives.³⁶