The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet

The mass-market success of The Art of Loving stimulated sales and royalties for all of Fromm’s writings, particularly in the United States. Combined with mounting lecture honoraria and his usual teaching and clinical revenues, Fromm’s American income jumped from $8,850 in 1953 to $29,874 in 1959 (approximately $215,000 in 2012 dollars). Now in his late fifties, Fromm assumed a new “life,” becoming a major benefactor of progressive American causes and donating to the election campaigns of Adlai Stevenson, J. William Fulbright, Phillip Hart, Eugene McCarthy, and others. Substantial checks were often followed by long personal letters, coupling praise with general and specific policy recommendations. Personal responses from these politicians often formed the basis for longstanding friendships, through which Fromm exercised important advisory roles in the higher levels of American government, including the Oval Office during the Kennedy administration.

Fromm continued to generate a constant stream of ideas on pressing public issues, and these often coalesced in his prose, especially in The Sane Society, which served as a theoretical guide or platform for the Committee for Sane Nuclear Policy, which Fromm helped to establish. He also worked to energize Amnesty International, the American Friends Service Committee, and the American Socialist Party. As he came increasingly to be regarded as a very important writer and thinker, roughly thirty lecture invitations from colleges and universities arrived each month. For an intellectual on the Left, this was a remarkable accomplishment. In contrast, a mid-1950s exchange with Herbert Marcuse staged in the journal Dissent was an event of a different order, diminishing his reputation among American academics, although it had minimal impact on his wider readership. When Tom Hayden, a leader of the New Left, fashioned his Port Huron statement in 1962 to launch Students for a Democratic Society, he drew heavily from Fromm’s writings, especially The Sane Society. Forty-eight years later, Hayden underscored to me that his Port Huron statement owed much to Fromm’s plea to recover man’s humanism and sanity in a world heading for nuclear war. In brief, Fromm, his money, his political activism, and his ideas helped form planks in the bridge of change from the conformity of McCarthyism and the early years of the Cold War to the more protean and rebellious 1960s.

Sales figures for The Sane Society were substantial—roughly three million copies sold worldwide during its first fifty years. The book was widely excerpted. Negative reviews came from the orthodox psychoanalytic establishment in America. In other quarters, the volume received glowing praise. Not long after publication, the book placed fifth on the New York Times bestseller list and was the top selection for the Pastoral Psychology Book Club. It commanded considerable attention from influential figures such as Paul Tillich, Robert Merton, and Joseph Wood Krutch. Perspectives, a popular journal that addressed public issues, became the first of many publications to ask Fromm for an article that summarized The Sane Society. Harvard faculty members, who sometimes joked that The Art of Loving was either a sex manual or a self-help book, thought differently about The Sane Society and invited Fromm to discuss it as the Distinguished George W. Gay Lecturer. Hundreds of invitations to present in other venues followed. If there was any doubt about Fromm’s status as a major writer and thinker, especially in the United States, the book overwhelmed the skeptics.2

Indeed, Fromm positioned The Sane Society alongside Escape from Freedom; he felt that both books focused on why alienated man feared freedom and voted for authoritarianism. But Escape had not focused on the “automaton conformity” underscored in The Sane Society, which Fromm saw dominating the United States and other Western postwar democracies. This conformity was a “socially patterned defect” through which an estranged population adjusted to an unhealthy society. The combination of “automaton conformity” and the façade of democratic governance yielded a disheartening result.

Fromm began writing The Sane Society early in the spring of 1953. He identified a “pathology of conformity” as the central problem; David Riesman, William Whyte, Richard Hofstadter, and others also regarded this as the downside of postwar democracies, though they were somewhat more hopeful than Fromm. Early in the volume, Fromm set forth his contempt for clinicians in democratic nations who promoted “insanity” in their clients by encouraging them to conform to dominant social customs instead of helping them discover their own unique passions and needs. “Automaton conformity” robbed democratic societies of their individuality and spontaneity. Indeed, Fromm embraced the pervasive myth in social science circles that prosperous and peaceful postwar democracies exhibited the highest rates of suicide, alcoholism, and other manifestations of severe mental disturbance. Those who did not suffer from mental illness were plagued, nevertheless, by general boredom and depression. If the material needs of the developed world had been satisfied, their spiritual and emotional requirements had not. Much as he had in Escape, the Fromm of The Sane Society acted as a severe critic of contemporary society. Unlike Escape, however, Fromm also played the part of a prophet of a quasi-utopian “humanistic” society.³

To make his case, Fromm enumerated essential needs for “sane” living. In a tone both less cautious and more prophetic, Fromm expanded on the theme that he had suggested for years. First, a person needed to unite with others—to share with them his passions and ideals without relinquishing the characteristics that made him unique. He required a balance of individuation and symbiosis, the only effective counterpoint to individual narcissism and social conformity. This was hardly a new formulation in personality theory, but what was unique was Fromm’s insistence that love was the only passion that held the two needs in balance:

Second, Fromm postulated that man needed to produce and create—that is, to transcend his passive circumstances. When man’s need to create could not be satisfied, he turned destructive and hateful. “To create,” Fromm wrote, “presupposes activity and care. It presupposes love for that which one creates.” There was no compromise: “if I cannot create life, I can destroy it. To destroy life makes me also transcend it.” Fromm was elaborating Freud’s dual-instinct theory—the life wish versus the death wish—but in his own lexicon, which tied the love of life to a nebulous notion that he came increasingly to call “humanism.”

Third, Fromm emphasized man’s need for a sense of rootedness: the purported security that a mother conferred to the newborn. Fromm insisted that humankind had always found its deepest sense of connectedness and unconditional embrace through motherly love—a firm rootedness in the deepest emotional sense of place—even as motherly love retarded the development of reason and individuality by perpetuating childlike dependencies. Fromm cited Bachofen’s description of a prehistoric matriarchy, which had been supplanted by a patriarchal society that promoted reason, conscience, discipline, individuality, hierarchy, and inequality. Notwithstanding this displacement, man continued to find rootedness and a sense of place in the motherly embrace. This was more than a twist on Freud’s preoccupation with patriarchy. Fromm spoke to the primacy of motherly love.

Fourth, Fromm postulated man’s basic need of a sense of his own unique identity, to depend upon himself as the active center of his powers and experiences rather than to find it by conforming to others. In acquiring this unique identity, man required a frame of orientation that encompassed not only thought and reason but emotion and intuition. Fromm’s formulation was compatible with Erik Erikson’s concept of “psychosocial identity,” although he never acknowledged this.⁵

In essence, Fromm was arguing that a sane society consisted of citizens who were self-directed. They depended upon their own capacities to love and to create, to think and to reason, to feel connected to themselves and to others. In contrast, insane societies forced the individual to conform to pervasive beliefs and practices—to forfeit his uniqueness. Consistent with Escape from Freedom and Man for Himself, Fromm argued that alienation was the primary impediment to sanity. Alienation made it impossible for man to experience himself as an active bearer of his own powers; it required him to depend on powers outside himself. Just as mass alienation had facilitated the Nazi movement in the 1930s, Fromm insisted that it had also become a symptom of the capitalist marketplace of postwar democracies.

“Man in Capitalistic Society” was the most compelling chapter in The Sane Society, enumerating as it did the reasons why twentieth-century marketplace society produced this sense of estrangement. The mythology of capitalism maintained that when a person pursued his own material profit, he contributed to the happiness of all. However, the reality was that the laws of the marketplace bypassed human needs. The capitalist expanded his enterprise not because he wanted to; rather, the laws of the marketplace socialized him to pursue expansion in the interest of greater profits. Indeed, “as a business grows, one has to continue making it bigger, whether one wants to or not.” Man eventually marketed himself as well as his products in return for the income that allowed him to consume.6

Marx had furnished Fromm with the theoretical foundation for “Man in Capitalist Society.” Since the early 1920s, when he studied with Salman Rabinkow, Fromm informed his social analyses with orthodox Marxist formulations. But by the late 1920s, as his psychoanalytic training deepened, Fromm found that orthodoxy to be insufficiently psychological. In the mid-1930s, he and others at the Frankfurt Institute came across the work of a younger and more psychologically compelling Marx. Though written in 1844, Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (also called The Paris Manuscripts) had not been published until 1932. It is unclear why Fromm did not draw from the 1844 Marx in his work at the Frankfurt Institute. As he wrote The Sane Society, however, Fromm drew from the Manuscripts abundantly. Like the Marx of 1844, Fromm spoke to the estrangement that capitalism inflicted upon the human psyche, thus clarifying for readers in the conservative consumer culture of the 1950s how capitalism abstracted and distorted the qualities that made them human. The capitalist way mandated market manipulation, acquisition, and consumption, substituting monetary values for human ones of love and community. Paraphrasing the 1844 Marx, Fromm stated the matter succinctly: “We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; we live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.”7

Fromm went beyond this social critique by underscoring Marx’s utopian alternative, where man could cease to feel estranged from himself and could live in a classless society of justice, brotherliness, and reason. For Marx, such a transformation signaled the end of a “pre-history” of alienation and the beginning of a more creative human history. For Fromm, it was the transition from the estrangement and discontent inherent in marketplace society to a postcapitalist sane society.⁸

Hoping to mix utopian visions with practical steps to create a sane society, Fromm (like Marx before him) focused on the workplace. Workers felt no joyous and creative connectedness to their labor. They shared “a vague feeling that life is useless.” The solution was to create labor communities where workers assumed a degree of ownership in a company and participated in making vital decisions.⁹

Fromm also advocated a political transformation that would give weight to voters’ choices. In discussing elections, the news media and the politicians relied on polemical, entertaining, and fanciful clichés rather than “a concrete, meaningful picture of the world.” This notion would return in the historian Daniel Boorstin’s description of a world of “pseudo-events,” discussed in his important study The Image (1961). Political parties and bureaucracies packaged opportunistic messages for electoral consumption. For Fromm, in contrast, localism was vital if democracy was to become meaningful, and he emphasized a restoration of the New England town meeting tradition, where citizens discussed issues face to face. It is instructive here that Hannah Arendt had also made the case for local participatory politics as a means to a revitalized polis. The two were not far apart in their goals.¹⁰

Another path to sanity was cultural transformation. Here, too, the decisive factor was decentralization—“concrete face-to-face groups, active responsible participation”—as a means of reversing man’s feelings of estrangement and atomization and to restore his sense of community. The essential task was to enhance man’s contributions to a community’s shared culture. Fromm referred to this shared culture as “collective art,” which elevated man above the culture of the marketplace and consumerism. Fromm was discomfortingly vague, here. Was he describing an individual who needed to be cooperative and emotionally grounded in order to produce collective art? Or did the “humanistic community” and its aesthetic sensibilities create the integrated and psychologically stable individual?11

Fromm’s final path toward a sane society involved transforming both education and religion. Schools in Western democracies taught life’s practical tasks rather than the humanistic ideals of Western civilization, thereby cultivating marketable conformist personalities. Fromm proposed to eliminate “the harmful separation between theoretical and practical knowledge.” Coupled with education, Fromm valued “humanistic” religion as culturally transformative: it eschewed idolatry and notions of an all-powerful God and elevated the needs of man—dignity, brotherly love, reason, and “the supremacy of spiritual over material values.” A humanistic religion championed the precepts of love and justice and represented the ethical core of a sane society.¹²

Fromm’s discussion of education and religion was too abbreviated to add much to his case for political and cultural transformation. For example, although he insisted that a decentralized community where people communicated face to face was central to “sanity,” he bypassed problems inherent in reestablishing localism in a world where urbanization, industrialization, and corporate development were agencies for even greater centralization. Resting too heavily on visions of a lost world of medieval villages and New England town meetings as his models for a vaguely stated humanism in a sane society, Fromm was involved in a politics of prophecy.

The Sane Society was a weaker book than Escape from Freedom in part because the two books spoke to different times. Escape addressed a world endangered by dictatorships and world war. The Sane Society addressed an America that he saw immersed in consumerism and conformity. The Sane Society was the more political book, offering measures to restore democracy; Escape was the more psychological volume, elaborating on the alienation and sadomasochism central to an authoritarian personality. Finally, Escape was more tightly argued and intellectually probing, rooted as it was in Fromm’s articles at the Frankfurt Institute. The Sane Society was easier to read, arranged by a sequential presentation of artificially separated categories, while its lines of reasoning were less rigorously backed up.

Unlike Fromm, Marcuse was primarily a philosopher and a political theorist who had worked for American intelligence agencies during the 1940s. Yet he remained affiliated with the Frankfurt Institute after Fromm left. His book Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (1941) did not mention Freud or psychoanalysis but was a major rehabilitation of Hegel, locating him at the core of a German idealist tradition with strong affinities to Marx. Reason and Revolution also examined elements of what had come to be called “critical theory.” Invoking Hegel, Marcuse defended continental radicalism against the empiricism and positivism that he felt were inherent in liberalism. At base, Reason and Revolution posited that it was not possible to be critical of the existing social order or to promote greater egalitarianism without first understanding the connections between human reason, freedom, and happiness.13

Marcuse’s next book, Eros and Civilization (1955), represented his first serious exploration of psychoanalysis. Beginning in 1952, when he accepted a professorship at Columbia University, Marcuse became a familiar figure in the academy. He befriended the so-called New York intellectuals of the anti-Stalinist Left—social critics such as Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin, who frequented the offices of Partisan Review. Marcuse also spent time at Harvard, Brandeis, and the San Diego campus of the University of California. Unlike Fromm, Marcuse took advantage of comprehensive university libraries and a community of scholars. In Eros and Civilization, however, Marcuse paid little attention to the large corpus of Freud’s clinical writing, focusing instead on Freud’s metapsychology. More specifically, Marcuse addressed Freud’s philosophical critique of civilization as an agency that constrained libidinal drives. He included an explosive essay in the epilogue of Eros and Civilization—a critique of “neo-Freudian revisionism”—which attacked Fromm and The Sane Society. Marcuse submitted this essay in slightly modified form to Dissent a short time before Eros and Civilization was published.

Launched on a small budget in the winter of 1954 by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, Dissent was one of the few serious American publications that coupled unwavering opposition to McCarthyism and Stalinism with commitments to democratic socialism, civil liberties, and racial equality. Indeed, Dissent represented a thoughtful counterpoint to the ready compromises of many Democratic Party liberals and their Cold War orthodoxies. Dissent also opposed the romanticized view of the Soviet Union as a worker’s paradise, a view advanced, for example, by the American Communist Party leader Herbert Aptheker and by the Monthly Review editors Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman. Close colleagues of the “New York intellectuals,” Howe and Coser were suspicious of abstract “programs” for remaking the world but, unlike Cold War liberals, they hoped to maintain a reflective commitment to democratic socialism. They included Fromm on their editorial board owing to his prominence, his critique of mass culture, and the widely acknowledged importance of Escape from Freedom in the scholarly community. But Howe and Coser soon regretted their selection, finding Fromm arrogant and difficult to work with, often uncompromising, sometimes naïve in his politics, and wedded to utopian visions of a democratic socialist society. In time, the two Dissent editors lost any sense of affinity with Fromm and thus had no compunction about offending him by publishing Marcuse’s essay “The Social Implications of Freudian ‘Revisionism.’”¹⁴

Dissent had been short on articles relevant to psychoanalysis, and the essay appeared to be a good fit. Having accepted Marcuse’s piece, Howe and Coser offered Fromm the option to respond. In the summer of 1955, Dissent introduced Marcuse’s essay as a “controversial article” and announced that Fromm would reply in the next issue. Marcuse then replied to Fromm’s reply, to which Fromm offered a counterrebuttal; the exchange extended into 1956. This caustic and uncivil debate grew into one of the most intriguing exchanges in postwar intellectual history.

Marcuse attacked neo-Freudians in general and Fromm in particular for bypassing Freud’s vital constructs: libidinal theory, the concept of a death instinct, the primal horde of patricides, and the concept of an Oedipus complex. Strategically, Marcuse duplicated the line of attack against the neo-Freudians that the leftist American social critic Paul Goodman had advanced in a 1945 issue of Politics; if Fromm knew of the article, he did not think to reference it. By underplaying the role of instinctual drives at the expense of social forces, Goodman pointed out that the “free personality” postulated by the neo-Freudians had “sprung from nowhere … without a past … without an unconscious and transparent through and through.” The self, therefore, had no referent other than society—no inner psychological depth or psychic struggles and therefore no capacity for independent social critique.15

Consistent with Adorno, Horkheimer, and Goodman, Marcuse noted that by deemphasizing drives in their largely sexual manifestations, Fromm and other neo-Freudians failed to explore much beyond the repressive nature of society. By deemphasizing sexuality, early childhood experiences, and the unconscious, they removed any vantage point from which man could resist the values of society. As Marcuse put it:

Orthodox Freudians on the Left, especially Marcuse’s friends among the “New York intellectuals,” praised his critique of neo-Freudianism, but so did leftist intellectuals generally. Freudian modernism, so called, with its focus on inner subjectivities and the importance of libidinal drives in character formation, was popular at the time among a good many academics and social critics. To a large extent, this marginalized Fromm’s concept of social character, since it gave primacy to social structures and institutions external to the self.

Fromm’s reply to Marcuse appeared in the next issue of Dissent, and it was astute. For one, he noted that it was problematic for Marcuse to label him a neo-Freudian, as by doing so Marcuse ignored basic differences between himself, Horney, and Sullivan: “This lumping together has the unfortunate result that Marcuse substantiates his brief against me by quoting Horney or Sullivan whenever there is no passage from my writings which would serve the purpose.” Second, while the Freudian metapsychology that Marcuse embraced was concerned with problems inherent in civilization at large, Fromm found that it bypassed the difficulties intrinsic to capitalism. The indignities of the capitalist marketplace explained why both he and Marcuse had embraced Marx. For Fromm, Marcuse was recanting on their common effort to fuse Marx and Freud. Third, Fromm held that Marcuse wrongly assumed that man was primarily a biological being who required instinctual (largely sexual) gratification. Man was also a self-conscious social and moral person who needed to relate to others and to possess a frame or orientation within the context of his society. Indeed, the human, unlike other species, had transcended the natural world of impulse and restraint: “He is life aware of itself.” Fromm was clearly no Freudian modernist focused on inner psychic tensions, often to the exclusion of outer social structures. In the context of the Dissent debate, Marcuse was.¹⁷

Fourth, Fromm insisted that Marcuse’s advocacy of instinctual release through greater sexual satisfaction was congruent with twentieth-century capitalism’s tenet of mass consumption. Modern capitalism promoted a “greed for things and the inability to postpone the satisfaction of wishes.” Whether one consumed by acquiring sexual partners and satisfying sexual passions or by accumulating other goods and services, one participated in a malfunctioning marketplace society. Finally, Fromm accused Marcuse of pessimism to the point of nihilism by assuming that only when repression of the instinctual had dehumanized and alienated man would he be spurred to revolution. Worse was better. Marcuse found no potential, Fromm insisted, for any creative productivity, happiness, or genuine love under capitalism. As such, Marcuse ignored the Marxist dialectic—that within capitalism, there were limited potentialities for self-transformation and happiness. However, these potentialities could “migrate” into “socialist humanism.”18

Although a debate such as this typically ended with the rebuttal from the “aggrieved” party, Marcuse’s exchange with Fromm seemed to carry a momentum of its own. Moreover, over the course of the debate, Dissent subscribers and others in the intellectual Left had interchanges of their own. Indeed, the debate enlarged Dissent’s modest readership. Consequently, when Marcuse asked Howe and Coser if he could rebut Fromm’s rebuttal, they consented, without asking Fromm. The deck was stacked.

Marcuse argued that Fromm’s rebuttal misinterpreted Freud on many counts. Freud had not advocated emancipation through unrestrained sexual release; indeed, he had underscored how the inhibition and sublimation of sexual instinct promoted artistic and cultural accomplishments. Freud also held that as restraints on instinctual life promoted discontent, a tradeoff was always involved, and those restraints sometimes had to be eased. Freud had offered a radical social critique, Marcuse concluded. In contrast, Fromm’s “road to sanity” represented palliatives for “a smoother functioning of the established society.” For Marcuse, Fromm’s emphasis on worker participation in management and decision making stood for nothing save “more and better industrial psychology and scientific management.” The essential problem, for Marcuse, was that as the years went by, Fromm moved further and further away from the instinctual basis of human personality. He had instead embraced “positive thinking which leaves the negative where it is—predominant over the human existence.” What Fromm decried as modern “alienation” Marcuse characterized as widespread resistance to a repressive, if well-managed, status quo. “Alienation” was actually the refusal of workers to settle for Fromm’s palliatives.¹⁹

In this last issue of the Dissent exchange, after Marcuse had attacked Fromm a second time, Fromm penned a short counterrebuttal. He was distraught, realizing that Howe and Coser essentially agreed with Marcuse. More important, he knew that Marcuse had made his concept of social character problematic and, more generally, had damaged his very standing as a social critic. Fromm simply asserted that Marcuse’s retort did “not add much to his original article.” Rather than protect The Sane Society against Marcuse’s savage critique, Fromm pushed the discussion to a more precise level of discourse. He sparred with Marcuse on two issues: whether Freud had postulated “that happiness is satisfaction of the sexual instinct” and whether Freud felt that “man has an inherent wish for unlimited sexual satisfaction.” For Fromm, “Freud’s point is not to doubt that genital satisfaction is the source of happiness.” But Freud had also noted that man would “never be completely happy because any kind of civilization forces him to frustrate the full satisfaction of his genital desires.” Fromm’s problem here (and Marcuse’s too) was that given the vast corpus of Freud’s writings over many decades, Freud’s various references to sexual impulses yielded to a diversity of reasonable interpretations. Having studied Freud longer and more systematically than had Marcuse, Fromm did underscore the range of Freud’s remarks on sexual impulses. But he did not avail himself of the opportunity to outdo Marcuse on the issue of who had a greater command of the breadth of Freud’s writings. Had he done so, he might have turned the direction of the debate back his way. Instead, Fromm’s fallback position at the end of the debate was simply to note that Freud acknowledged qualities beyond man’s instinctive life that contributed to one’s humanity. Marcuse had been able to assert categorically (as Freud did not always do) that instinctive expressions and the minimization of repressions were the essentials for a free and happy society.20

The Dissent exchange damaged Fromm’s quest for academic and scholarly respectability and seemed to cast him in a marginalized role. In some ways, this was comparable to what he felt as a child in his parents’ home and what he had experienced when he had been dismissed from the Frankfurt Institute. The pervasive view among social commentators, scholars, and psychoanalysts was precisely what Fromm had expected: that Marcuse had bested him. This appraisal of who had won and who had lost the Dissent exchange is difficult to sustain from the specific texts that Marcuse and Fromm had written, but at the time this was of little consequence. For decades after the encounter, leading scholars and social critics, including H. Stuart Hughes, Paul Robinson, Christopher Lasch, and Russell Jacoby, reiterated Marcuse’s line of attack against Fromm. They also presumed, flaunting the laws of chronology, that given that Marcuse had “bested” Fromm in 1955–1956, Fromm could not have played a pivotal role twenty-five years earlier, during the founding years of the Frankfurt Institute. They read history backward. The sociologist Neil McLaughlin called this specious conclusion the “origins myth,” which essentially rewrote history to deprive Fromm of his formidable role in the development of a prestigious and scholarly institution. The Dissent exchange thus doubly damaged his reputation and did much to make him what McLaughlin characterizes as a “forgotten intellectual.”21

Fromm never forgave Marcuse for his aggressive posture in the Dissent exchange or Howe and Coser for facilitating the debate. Up till then, he had not been apprehensive over discussions and dialogues with scholars and social critics. But after the perceived drubbing Marcuse had given him, Fromm determined never to put himself in a similar situation again. He became especially cautious in Marcuse’s presence. When Marcuse and Fromm wound up traveling on the same train a few years later, Fromm ignored him. Marcuse tried to mend the breach by asking Fromm to review his book, One-Dimensional Man, in the New York Times Book Review. Pleading a heavy workload, Fromm refused, commenting to a friend, the Trotskyite scholar Raya Dunayevskaya, that “our rightwing enemies” would benefit if he publicly attacked Marcuse as Marcuse had attacked him—a strange contention. Though he had only partially read Eros and Civilization at the time of the Dissent exchange, Fromm subsequently studied it, and he did carefully examine Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. He was “really shocked,” Fromm wrote Dunayevskaya, about Marcuse’s “incompetent treatment of Freud” in both books and about how Marcuse revealed “an alienation and despair masquerading as radicalism.” In another letter, Fromm mentioned to his Swedish friend Margit Norell that Marcuse focused on Freud’s abstract and theoretical metapsychology but knew nothing about “the whole clinical empirical part of Freud’s discoveries”—particularly dream interpretation, resistance, and unconscious processes generally. Worse yet, Marcuse’s “statement that [he tried] to reduce the conflict between the individual and capitalist society is just plain dishonest.” The problem was that Marcuse’s charge against Fromm of acquiescence in the status quo had “been taken over by people who apparently do not even bother to read most of [Freud’s] books.”²²

It is ironic that although the Marcuse attack damaged Fromm’s reputation within important intellectual circles, his general influence expanded in the 1950s, underscoring a gap between academic and popular discourse. His books sold in the millions globally (especially in the Americas and Germany), he influenced major American political figures, he was in demand as a lecturer, and he was a leading presence in Mexican psychoanalysis. Far more than Marcuse, Adorno, or Horkheimer, Fromm’s reputation was international and extended beyond intellectual and scholarly circles.

At the beginning of that politically conservative decade, Fromm was preoccupied with Henny’s illness, his move to Mexico, and mentoring and training, and he did not participate in the initial struggle against McCarthyism. But he was not victimized by it either. To be sure, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had compiled a large file on Fromm. Fortunately, FBI agents were able to distinguish his commitment to Marxism and democratic socialism from an allegiance to the American Communist Party. Relatively immune from Red Scare intimidations and uninterested in hoarding his substantial royalties, Fromm gave abundantly to progressive social causes. There is no evidence that his philanthropy was a guise either to lower his tax liabilities or to enhance his reputation. Rather, his program of patronage complimented his increasing political activism. Fromm explained that he was embracing Jewish ethics (not Jewish institutional forms) through donations and political action: it was not enough ethically to offer trenchant commentaries concerning public affairs. One must act politically for one’s beliefs, and dispensing funds was one of several forms of political action. Indeed, Fromm regarded his role as a major patron to progressive causes less as a form of philanthropy than as a component of his program for political action. He offered money and advice, often behind the scenes, to important power brokers who had little time for his prophetic jeremiads. But they occasionally found value in data he had come across on specific public issues about which he had expert knowledge.23

Prompted by deepening American-Soviet hostilities and the fear of a nuclear weapons exchange, Fromm sought to initiate conversations with likeminded American public intellectuals who were estranged from both American Cold War liberalism and the heavy-handed Stalinist machinations in the Soviet Union. In early 1955, he coauthored with Daniel Bell, Lewis Mumford, and Max Lerner a “statement of conscience” critical of American policy toward China and put up most of the money required to publish it as a half-page advertisement in the New York Times. The advertisement was addressed to President Eisenhower and advocated U.S. recognition of communist China, cessation of American support for Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorial regime in Formosa, and a conference of the major powers to diffuse Far Eastern tensions. Next, Fromm cofounded and bankrolled SANE (the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy), and he urged his activist colleagues to oppose the Soviet-American nuclear arms race. He gave generously to the American Friends Service Committee and promoted its peace policies. As a friend of Norman Thomas, the head of the American Socialist Party, Fromm became one of its major financial supporters. In 1960, he wrote the party’s manifesto of principles, which advocated international coexistence and an end to the Cold War. Bertrand Russell, perhaps the most respected social commentator turned peace activist in the West, regarded Fromm as a friend who gave meaning to the term “philanthropy.”24

It is less known that Fromm influenced two of the three presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson as well as the policies of J. William Fulbright, the most highly regarded foreign policy specialist in the U.S. Senate. Additionally, Fromm played an advisory role to various congressional liberals, and some within the Kennedy administration periodically took Fromm’s foreign policy perspectives seriously. Early in the 1960s, Fromm guided Amnesty International and its coordination with high-level American and European government officials in a brilliantly orchestrated diplomatic effort to rescue a close relative, Heinz Brandt, from almost certain death in an East German labor camp. Later in that decade, he financially supported and sometimes advised the presidential hopeful Senator Eugene McCarthy. Occasionally, U.S. State Department officials asked for Fromm’s assessment of the politics of postwar Germany. There was a kind of contradiction here. While Fromm was very public about being a democratic socialist and peace activist, behind the scenes he sometimes influenced officials who shaped the problematic American foreign policy during the most difficult years of the Cold War. Usually, these two forms of political action—in and out of public view—required different patterns of conduct. Yet there were moments when Fromm was unmindful of the distinctions.

Stevenson promptly replied to Fromm’s verbose letter, underscoring how important it was to him: “It recharges my depleted battery.” He was pleased that Fromm characterized his campaign as a beacon of light for humanistic values; he would “always feel nourished by your belief that it is worthwhile.” The governor reported that he was reading Escape from Freedom and noted that Fromm’s portrayal of demagogy applied not only to European fascism but to McCarthyism in America. Indeed, Stevenson sensed “the undercurrents of authoritarianism” in the United States, agreeing with Fromm that these troubling symptoms required “diagnosis and public disclosure—over and over—I suspect.” The governor suggested that if he decided to run a second time, he was counting on Fromm to assist him. For Fromm, the potential for a cooperative effort seemed to be in place. For Stevenson, it may have been more a matter of being polite and respectful.²⁶

Distracted by Henny’s death and then by courting Annis, Fromm took a long time to reply to Stevenson. In March 1954, he mailed a five-page, single-spaced letter—apparently, Fromm considered such a daunting missive the right length for an active national political figure who had, at best, only a few minutes to peruse it. The governor needed to know, Fromm cautioned, that he was a democratic socialist in a McCarthyite climate. It could be “embarrassing to you politically, to have any such connections.” If this did not matter to Stevenson (as it didn’t), Fromm was willing to brief the governor on his special policy interests, particularly as they pertained to European politics and culture. Reflecting an elevated sense of self-importance verging on narcissism, Fromm invited Stevenson to Mexico to begin these policy discussions and to lecture at the National University during the visit.27

This was but the start of the letter. Fromm provided Stevenson, at considerable length, with a historical perspective on why Western civilization was in crisis. He restated the historical narrative line of Escape from Freedom, even though Stevenson had told him that he was already familiar with the book. Fromm recommended that Stevenson try to reignite the basic ideals of Western humanism through a spiritual message emphasizing the dignity of the free individual with love and solidarity and reason.²⁸

Like Norman Mailer, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and other social commentators enchanted by the political process early in the Cold War, Fromm hoped to assist the governor, but his letter was far too long and lacked tact. He concluded the letter by underscoring the nature of Stevenson’s leadership role in the Democratic Party. The governor would become “the spearhead and rallying point” for “the renaissance and development of the humanistic heritage of the Western world.” Unlike President Eisenhower, who had more pressing tasks than to take up the culture of the marketplace, Fromm predicted that Stevenson would lead a “crusade for human solidarity” and would “reconvert a population which has been drowned in materialism, to the spirit of humanism.” Eisenhower and the Republicans had gained political traction, Fromm simplistically asserted, by campaigning against New Deal programs and denouncing government activism. In contrast, Fromm would have Stevenson and the Democrats “speak in the name of the American ideal of individual initiative, decentralization, and the vision that men should begin to think by themselves, and cease to be robots.” He proposed, as he had in a draft of The Sane Society, that Stevenson call for small town meetings in the colonial New England tradition. Issues discussed at these meetings could become the agenda of government agencies and elected officials. Heavy on abstraction, written in a portentously prophetic tone, and inordinately long, the letter demonstrated that Fromm had little sense that Stevenson had more pressing concerns to address and was simply being convivial.²⁹

But there was another dimension to the relationship. Fromm had drafted a program for a second run for the White House premised on “a better life in human terms.” There is no record of Stevenson explicitly responding to Fromm’s electoral plan, but the evidence suggests that he was not dismissive. Indeed, before his presidential run in 1956, Stevenson conferred privately with Fromm and the more politically adept David Riesman to discuss foreign policy issues. They focused on the arms race and the hydrogen bomb. But discussion was most intense when they got to the status of Berlin as the primary point of tension between East and West. In this face-to-face exchange, Stevenson was impressed by Fromm’s understanding of European politics and especially by Fromm’s capacity to garner and to analyze key German documents not always available to American policy makers. He promised to draw on Fromm’s nuanced understanding of East German and Soviet motivations as they affected Berlin. Fromm insisted that to reduce tensions between the superpowers and avert a nuclear catastrophe, the United States had to reach an accord with the Soviets that encompassed more than the Berlin problem. Agreement on arms control was even more important, Fromm argued. Stevenson took extensive notes during the meeting and enthusiastically promised to stay in contact with Fromm. This time, in a dialogue with a specific agenda, Stevenson was being more than polite. He was learning from Fromm.30

Fromm’s role in the 1956 Stevenson presidential campaign was unremarkable. The two corresponded, especially about European issues. Seeing himself not as a political advisor but as more of a policy consultant, Fromm sent Stevenson more reading material than a candidate in the thick of a presidential race could possibly absorb. The two wrote and conversed on a first-name basis at this point, and Stevenson valued Fromm as one of his few contacts on the campaign trail who was an intellectual and a scholar. When John F. Kennedy won the White House in 1960 and installed Stevenson as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Fromm hoped that “Adlai” would call on him more frequently. When tensions with the Soviets were particularly acute and the new president seemed excessively belligerent, Fromm asked Stevenson to give Kennedy a lesson in Russian politics—that Khrushchev was practicing “conservative state capitalism” while professing socialism. Indeed, Khrushchev was “frozen into a very rigid ritualistic thinking” and presided over “a centralized, managerial state capitalism” averse to nuclear brinksmanship. Fromm had astutely assessed the situation and asked Stevenson to explain to Kennedy that the United States could negotiate successfully with the Soviets.³¹

Although Fromm and Stevenson got together from time to time, letters remained their primary mode of communication. After Stevenson read one of Fromm’s letters to the New York Times recommending far-reaching disarmament agreements with the Soviets, he let Fromm know that he was skeptical, especially of Soviet willingness to sign and live by a disarmament treaty with effective inspection of the weapons that were to be reduced or eventually eliminated. Stevenson reported that at President Kennedy’s urging he and several others in the administration were trying to conclude a test ban treaty with the Soviets containing mechanisms to verify potential atomic tests but that the Soviet military was opposed: “They have their Pentagon too!” To amplify the point, Ambassador Stevenson sent Fromm a copy of a highly classified document—a comprehensive disarmament treaty with the verification measures that Kennedy proposed to the Soviets. Stevenson and his friend “Erich” needed to “have a talk about these things.” Fromm responded that U.S. anti-Soviet hysteria could be eased if Kennedy publicized all of the disarmament proposals the Soviets had offered to America. Additionally, Fromm recommended that the United States “soften” its presence in Berlin—a major contributor to Soviet-American tensions. Largely through symbolic troop reductions and less bellicose rhetoric, the Berlin situation could be ameliorated. In a subsequent letter, Fromm told Stevenson about his recent trip on behalf of SANE to an international peace conference hosted by the Soviets in Moscow. He was more convinced than ever, after this meeting, that long-term peace with Russia could occur if the post–World War II territorial lines were recognized. Fromm knew that Stevenson would pass the suggestion on to the president.32

The friendship that developed with Stevenson created a modest niche for Fromm in foreign policy debates. In some measure, Fromm had to be listened to because friends in West Germany regularly sent him documents that the State Department lacked and needed. These documents revealed much not only about West German politics but about secret negotiations between East Germany and the Soviets. More generally, Fromm was able to discuss nuances in the relationship of German politics to American-Soviet relationships, which U.S. foreign policy specialists valued. But he never stopped using his Stevenson connection and frequently urged the U.N. ambassador to counter the hawks in the Kennedy administration. Fromm did not realize that Stevenson was secondary to Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, and others on the hawkish side that had the president’s ear. Nor could he understand why Stevenson was unwilling to assume a gadfly role in high-level foreign policy discussions. Of course, Stevenson understood what Fromm did not: his role in the administration would be weakened beyond what it already was if he became a gadfly. In sum, Fromm’s contact with Stevenson did not, in itself, give him a great deal of influence. But it is striking that a very vocal peace activist on the Left, unschooled in the ways of insider politics, could be involved in private communications with officials at the highest level of the government.

If Fromm’s rapport with Stevenson had enhanced his confidence in the political realm, his friendship with Riesman helped him feel much more at ease and proficient on a variety of political stages. Indeed, from time to time the three met together not only to discuss global tensions but to ponder American electoral politics. Whereas Riesman may have been a bit more sympathetic to the American foreign policy establishment than Fromm, they both worked to reverse the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race and to mitigate global tensions. Correspondence between Fromm and Riesman discussing the dangers of the Cold War was profuse. The two trusted each other, and almost every letter was personally supportive of the other. Riesman was troubled about Fromm’s deteriorating health and tried to arrange social visits involving their wives to relax his friend. He was congratulatory whenever Fromm published a book and found it “extraordinary that you can work so hard.” Fromm was also keenly supportive of Riesman’s research projects. Fromm named Riesman beneficiary of one of his life insurance policies and confided to him what he never told to others: that he simply could not get along with I. F. Stone, Sidney Hook, and Erik Erikson.33

Fromm was reassured that Riesman could guide him through the nuances of American politics. Indeed, Riesman was usually more comfortable than Fromm in the public realm, having had extensive and wide-ranging legal experience. In 1947, Riesman prodded Fromm to join with other American Jews to provide a non-Zionist alternative in the Middle East—namely to lobby for the creation of a multinational Jewish-Arab state in Palestine. The two joined the editorial board of the Jewish Newsletter to help publicize this cause. Fromm gathered support for that project from transplanted Israeli intellectuals such as his old friend Martin Buber as well as the Reform rabbi Judah Magnes. With Fromm’s help, Riesman published an article in Commentary about how difficult it was for American Jews to deal with the slaughter of six million European Jews and that this genocide explained the newfound interest in Zionism. With the state of Israel less than conciliatory toward its Arab neighbors, Fromm and Riesman opposed Jewish-American groups lobbying American government officials to take a decidedly pro-Israel orientation. Riesman and Fromm pursued, instead, a “realistic” balance between the interests of Israel and its Arab neighbors. They also spoke out against Israel’s “Sampson [sic] complex”—an overly rigid negotiating policy toward those who came to be called the “Palestinians” under the guise of averting a second Holocaust.34

By the mid-1950s, even as the Dissent debate was raging and The Art of Loving was transforming Fromm into an international celebrity, Riesman led him into a good many political ventures. Based upon years of investigation, Fromm became a formidable analyst of ways in which conflicts between the occupying powers in postwar Berlin jeopardized American-Soviet relationships. Riesman insisted that because this was one of Fromm’s areas of expertise, he was obligated to persuade America’s foreign policy makers to embrace a less aggressive attitude toward the Soviets in their shared governance of Berlin. Indeed, Riesman scheduled regular visits for Fromm with two influential senators, J. William Fulbright and Philip Hart, to discuss the matter. Riesman also put Fromm in contact with leaders of the American Friends Service Committee, who had been working for a modus vivendi between the Soviets and the Americans over nuclear weapons. In time, Fromm became one of the most important advocates and funders of the AFSC and took an increasing interest in Amnesty International. Although Fromm had written to A. J. Muste and supported his pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, Riesman cemented their friendship. When Cold War tensions escalated, Fromm campaigned with Riesman for a nuclear test ban, for a ban on the hydrogen bomb, and to eliminate the Polaris missile–carrying submarine. Indeed, some of Fromm’s books and articles published between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s were rooted in foreign policy discussions with important politicians as well as with peace activists. In brief, the Riesman connection differed from the Stevenson bond in that with Stevenson Fromm was required to work confidentially among powerful political insiders. With Riesman, there was a better balance between vocal work in the peace movement for all to see, on the one hand, and the more pragmatic insider politics on the other. 35

Fromm’s relationship with Fulbright deepened over time. He came to regard Fromm as an important intellectual who was quite knowledgeable about foreign affairs. Fulbright even read Fromm’s exchange with Marcuse in Dissent and could not understand why scholars were convinced that Marcuse had emerged the victor. Had it taken place in the Senate chamber, Fulbright joked, Fromm would have won hands down. Fromm sought to help Fulbright politically, realizing how difficult it was for a politician from an ultraconservative, doggedly segregationist state, running on a platform of progressive foreign policy, to retain his Senate seat, and he made substantial financial contributions to Fulbright’s reelection campaigns. Fromm suggested campaign themes that might appeal to Arkansas voters—“concepts of individualism, the importance of values to live what one professes as against being subject to the manipulation of the big machine.” Fulbright took these suggestions seriously. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright invited Fromm to testify on hot topics such as allied access to Berlin and Soviet global intentions. Fromm praised his friend for essentially using committee hearings to promote Soviet-American détente. Though averse to travel, Fromm went to Washington to testify before Congressional committees when Fulbright felt it was essential: “I do not feel entitled to neglect anything in which I could be helpful.” Fulbright’s commitment to the public realm and to matters of public policy was also Fromm’s.³⁷

Fulbright and Fromm developed a good many common positions. Both favored a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement, the reduction of Cold War tensions, and ridding the world of nuclear weapons. They exchanged publications and speeches and had dinner together whenever they were in the same city. “We did enjoy so much seeing you and Annis. You stimulate our tired & empty brains,” Fulbright jested after one of the dinners. Once Fulbright (in a misreading of Democracy in America) asked Fromm if Tocqueville had been right to question American democracy—“they say the Lord looks out for the U.S. along with babies and idiots.” When Fulbright faced a formidable reelection campaign in 1974 owing to the pro-Zionist financial contributions to his opponent, who campaigned demagogically for the votes of lower-class whites, Fromm tried to help Fulbright financially and was among the first to console Fulbright when he was defeated: “you are so much a man resting in himself that it will not do you any harm.” He counseled Fulbright to write a weekly newspaper column as a voice of “sanity, humanity, and reason.”38

Fromm’s role as a major funder for and political advocate of antiwar politics in America during the increasingly heated exchanges with the Soviets took two forms. One was a politics of prophecy, where Fromm energized the likeminded—be it within SANE, within the American Socialist Party, or, more generally, with progressive political activists. A good many of his writings and lectures were intended to diminish the tensions of the Cold War. This was no small achievement in the conservative political climate of the 1950s. But Fromm’s other form of political activity was less well known: his willingness to work continuously with members of the political establishment. This led to contact with a young and charismatic president of the United States.

Solid friendships with the ambassador to the United Nations and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee contributed to Fromm’s connection to Kennedy. The two acquainted the president with Fromm’s foreign policy perspectives, especially on Germany and European politics generally, and his anxiety over nuclear weapons. There was some receptivity. Kennedy had read Escape from Freedom. He had also read Fromm’s proposal in the special fall 1960 issue of Daedalus for a cautious, reasoned, and reversible sequence of steps in a program that Fromm mislabeled “unilateral disarmament.” Running for the presidency, Kennedy found the proposal interesting.³⁹

Kennedy was also familiar with some of Fromm’s guest columns and letters to the editor appearing in the New York Times. Fulbright briefed him on Fromm’s testimony before his Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Periodically, one of Fromm’s unpublished position papers found its way to the Oval Office.

Most important, Fromm’s perspectives reached the president through the “Harvard connection”: the central figures being McGeorge Bundy and David Riesman. When Bundy had been dean of Harvard College, Michael Maccoby was his special assistant, and the two developed a strong working relationship. Maccoby had studied briefly with Riesman at the University of Chicago and was all praise. In 1958, Bundy brought Riesman to Harvard. At the time, Carl Kaysen was a professor of economics at Harvard and consulted on projects with both Bundy and Riesman. When Kennedy named Bundy his national security advisor, others in the “Harvard Connection” automatically enjoyed greater influence. Bundy hired Kaysen as his special assistant and initially considered bringing Maccoby in as another assistant. Kaysen admired Escape from Freedom and thought well of Fromm; Riesman and Maccoby talked with Fromm several times a week. It is no surprise, therefore, that the three brought Fromm to Bundy’s attention. From the beginning of the Kennedy administration, Bundy determined to give the president a wide spectrum of perspectives on important foreign policy issues. He considered Fromm when he sought a dove perspective.40

During the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Maccoby and Reisman were determined that Bundy have access to Fromm’s ideas, particularly those based on important information and documents on the Germany situation that Fromm had but that were unavailable to the State Department. Fromm therefore sometimes came up in Bundy’s briefings of Kennedy. There is no way of telling how seriously Kennedy took Fromm’s perspectives. He enjoyed contact with intellectuals and scholars but often tended to dismiss doves as unrealistic. It is clear, though, that Bundy briefed Kennedy on some of Fromm’s positions on international affairs, and the president never sought to eliminate them from his briefings. ⁴¹

There is interesting but hardly conclusive evidence to the effect that, at least once between the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in late October 1962 and the president’s watershed June 1963 American University commencement address, Kennedy personally contacted Fromm. Both Kaysen and Riesman attested to Kennedy’s initiative here. Maccoby had not heard Fromm mention it but thought it could well have happened. Perhaps under normal circumstances privately discounting recommendations from dove intellectuals, the president knew too well that the world had nearly been destroyed and that new perspectives were essential. If Kennedy sought Fromm out after the Cuban Missile Crisis, discussion may have involved the logic behind Fromm’s ideas in the Daedalus article and elsewhere of gradually escalating U.S. steps toward nuclear disarmament, so long as the Soviets reciprocated after each step.⁴²