The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet

Erich Fromm’s 1962 volume, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud, was the closest he came to writing an autobiography. The opening essay addressed aspects of his early life and was an invaluable personal testimony; the final chapter expounded on the three broadly prophetic goals synthesized in his book. Fromm acknowledged a primary debt to Marx more than Freud, although throughout his discussion, Freud’s thinking was more central. The volume sold roughly 1.5 million copies and was translated into eighteen languages.¹

Fromm’s first goal addressed his belief that society needed to embrace life, love, growth, and joy. These were the aspects of a “productive social character” that he came increasingly to equate with humanism, and they were part of what he called his “credo.” Without these virtues, society opted for spiritual death—ossification, dull repetitive labor, and unhappiness. Within months of writing Beyond the Chains, Fromm described these choices as forming a binary: biophilia versus necrophilia.

The former stood for a heightened sense of aliveness through which humankind confirmed his powers and his sense of self. But if man “will not choose life and does not grow, he will by necessity become destructive, a living corpse.” Which of the two one would choose would be strongly influenced by one’s surrounding family and society. At first glance, biophilia and necrophilia seem to be restatements of Freud’s instinct-based binaries of eros and thanatos. To some degree, of course, they are. Yet for Fromm the instinctual forces that Freud saw as fundamental in themselves were reconstructed and altered by the historically changing customs of society.²

Fromm proceeded to his second goal: once man elected life and growth, he would “arrive at the experience of universality.” He would drop the “archaic ties of blood and soil” and come to see himself as “a citizen of the world whose loyalty is to the human race and to life, rather than to any exclusive part of it.” He would love humankind and cease to be bound by destructive tribal and crudely nationalist loyalties.3

In human history over the past four thousand years, Fromm postulated, man had emancipated himself from the blind power of natural forces and assumed increasing control over his surroundings. He had mastered new organizational forms and developed technologies giving him great powers to produce goods and services. The problem was that these promising new organizations had evolved into heavy-handed bureaucracies whose primary task was to create or manufacture the blind need to consume. For Fromm, it did not matter whether these bureaucracies represented Western capitalism or Soviet or Chinese variations of communism. Consequently, his third visionary goal was to supplant bureaucracies with participatory democracies through which people could shape their resources and surroundings.⁴

Fromm’s final goal was a call for man to reinstate his ability to reason—“the capacity to recognize the unreality of most of the ideas that man holds, and to penetrate the reality veiled behind … deception and ideologies.” Indeed, twentieth-century man had the capacity, through reason, to renew hope and faith in his inherent dignity and talents. Above all, modern man, with his vast powers of reason, had to dispel the Cold War illusions of triumph through national military might, for these illusions were pushing the world toward the brink of nuclear war. ⁵

Fromm had been working to actualize his prophetic goals long before he set them forth in Beyond the Chains of Illusion, and he continued to elaborate on them until his death eighteen years later. But by the 1960s—the high years of the Cold War—he felt that if those goals were not realized in short order, countries would annihilate each other. This decade, to Fromm, represented a more dangerous time than under the dictatorships of the 1930s and 1940s. With the superpowers now brandishing nuclear weapons far more powerful than the atomic bomb that had obliterated Hiroshima, human extinction was more than a possibility. Fromm had made the case for a series of steps through which America would take the initiative and pressure the Soviets for a matching response so as to rid the world of nuclear weapons. As opposed to an endless arms race, this was a more rational and life-affirming option, he insisted, and therefore more consistent with his goals.-

Between 1959 and 1965, Fromm published five books, edited an internationally prepared volume on humanism, penned a manifesto for the American Socialist Party, and wrote many articles. His life as a writer had never been so prolific. He also reestablished contact with eclectic but reform-oriented European psychoanalysts averse to the Cold War and created the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies. Fromm continued to be a dominating presence in the Mexican Psychoanalytic Society and in the supervision of the early generations of Mexican psychoanalysts. He taught and supervised at the William Alanson White Institute in New York and periodically ran a few undergraduate courses at Michigan State University. All the while, he retained a clinical practice that required him to see his analysands with some regularity. Fromm also received roughly one invitation a day to lecture at an American university, and he was summoned regularly to testify before U.S. Congressional committees on foreign policy issues. He remained active in the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and joined David Riesman as a central presence in and donor to the Committee on Correspondence (a collectivity of scholars that publicized the dangers of nuclear war). Finally, he worked to build a global coalition of democratic socialists—a “third way” embracing neither American corporate capitalism nor Soviet state socialism. Fromm recruited intellectuals and scholars in America, Canada, and Western Europe for this coalition but focused on the Soviet “satellites” of Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.

Several factors contributed to this relentless pace. At base, Fromm was trying to perform three tasks that would help to reorganize his goals in a more serviceable direction. One was personal. He was using a manic-like pace to define his own talents and capacities—and their limits. Second, he was presenting his own activist political mission and his mission for the world: to avoid nuclear war, keep the peace, and transform America and the planet into a sane society where humanism defined the nature of life. Third, he was formulating a credo lined with prophecies and was testing the means to achieve it—how, in terms of ideas and tactics, could peace, sanity, and humanism be implemented? In brief, Fromm felt he and the planet carried a great burden—and had a remarkable opportunity—within a short window of time. At least in part, his many publications during this period must be read with a view to appreciating this integrative task.

Fromm’s great burst of energy began in 1959, shortly after the death of his mother. Rosa had always sought to control her only son, and he had found it difficult to free himself from that emotional cage. Life with Annis in Cuernavaca in the years immediately after his marriage to her was joyous, to be sure, and her dislike of Rosa seemed to help Fromm establish greater emotional distance from his mother. But Rosa grew deeply depressed living alone in her New York apartment with her son thousands of miles away. By 1957, Fromm felt compelled to visit her more frequently. Rosa complained of all she had lost in fleeing the Third Reich, especially her prized boxes of expensive silverware. Fromm hired a New York attorney with special experience in restitution law, and after extensive proceedings and much involvement on Fromm’s part, Rosa received a paltry 1,500 marks from the German authorities for the silverware. Fromm found the claim process difficult and demeaning, and it seemed to underscore his mother’s power over him. When she died at the age of eighty-two, Fromm did not grieve deeply. Rather, he experienced relief and newfound productivity.6

There was another personal but very different source of this new vitality. Fromm’s growing list of health problems suggested to him that his life would be short. After years of suffering from tuberculosis during the late 1920s and most of the 1930s, he had been relatively healthy until the mid-1950s, when at various times he suffered from chronic intestinal polyps, diverticulitis, “eye tension” that retarded reading, throat infections, bronchial inflammations, frequent bouts of cold and flu, viral grippe, and periods of exhaustion. What is striking in his letters to friends from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s was that he rarely allowed these illnesses, however severe, to interfere with his peace activities, his lecturing schedule, and his publication commitments. More concerned with Annis’s illnesses than his own, Fromm viewed his infirmities not as cause to slacken his pace but as reason to accelerate it. Time was short, he was on a mission, and he had to find the means to achieve it in a very dangerous world.⁷

In 1953, Fromm discovered that he no longer even appeared on the IPA membership list. He wrote to Ruth Eissler, the IPA executive secretary in New York, asking her to account for the omission. Eissler replied that since 1946, IPA membership had depended on membership in a component society. Because Fromm had resigned from the old DPG and had no desire to rejoin the not fully de-Nazified DPG, he had ceased to be a member of any IPA-affiliated society. Although Eissler noted that Fromm also belonged to the Washington Psychoanalytic Society, it was not a recognized “component society” of the IPA. As a lay analyst, he would therefore have to present his credentials to apply for IPA reinstatement before a joint IPA-APA screening committee (to which Eissler belonged). Fromm replied that even if he sent his credentials to the joint committee, he would be denied reinstatement because “my psychoanalytic views do not correspond to those of the majority.” Eissler retorted that she could not understand why anyone would be interested in IPA membership unless he or she stood for the “basic principles of psychoanalysis.” Fromm replied that he sought to “remain” an IPA member and not to become one; he should not have been dropped from membership in the first place. After Eissler failed to respond, Fromm realized that she was not the only high IPA figure intent on keeping him out of the organization. Heinz Hartmann and Ernst Kris, among others, operating behind the scenes objected to his explicit theoretical departure from Freud’s metapsychology and were leery of Marxist-Freudian fusions.8

Exclusion from the major international psychoanalytic organization hurt Fromm deeply. He considered one of his more important “lives” to be that of a psychoanalyst, and he regarded his formulations on personality structure to be at least periodically in dialogue with Freud’s. The exclusion was followed by troubles with the Washington Psychoanalytic Society, caused by Fromm’s status as a lay analyst and his unorthodox analytic training practices in Mexico. At this point, Fromm found it too painful and unproductive to seek affiliation with any relatively orthodox psychoanalytic organization. This problem echoed his exclusion from the Frankfurt Institute and from some American intellectual circles following the Dissent debate. Indeed, the sense of estrangement reached back to his feelings as a child in his parents’ home. Instead of being derailed by this state of affairs or compromising on his ethical stance, he began traveling regularly to Europe, especially to Germany and Austria, to meet with a new circle of colleagues including philosophers, theologians, and (less often) psychoanalysts. Several among them, including Adam Schaff and Raya Dunayevskaya, shared his Marxist sympathies and favored social activism. In a September 1961 presentation in Dusseldorf, Fromm outlined a common basis for theoretical and organizational affiliation of unorthodox societies and postulated an eclectic Freudianism that emphasized social and clinical data and humanistic values rather than Freud’s metapsychological premises. In 1962, unorthodox German and Austrian groups banded with the William Alanson White Institute and with Fromm’s Mexican Psychoanalytic Society to form the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS). In the years that followed, the IFPS emerged as a viable alternative to the IPA. Fromm was regarded as one of the founders of this new organization.⁹

Helping to forge a global organizational alternative to psychoanalytic orthodoxy, Fromm staked out his position in a slim 1959 volume, Sigmund Freud’s Mission: An Analysis of His Personality and Influence, and characterized it as a rebuttal to Ernest Jones’s monumental three-volume Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1953–1957). Fromm also wanted to state his case against psychoanalytic orthodoxy. He insisted that Jones had exalted Freud as a flawless pioneer while unfairly castigating Sándor Ferenczi and others who had sometimes creatively modified Freud’s often-changing approach. Fromm also pointed out the pettiness of Freud’s closest associates, an inner circle that included Fromm’s former analyst, Hanns Sachs. Indeed, Fromm contested the proprietorship claims of orthodox psychoanalysts at large. David Riesman wrote that Fromm had written “a beautiful, clear and vivid and moving book.” The volume constituted the first of several of Fromm’s efforts to invoke Marx somewhat erratically as a “remedy” for Freud’s “shortcomings” and, in the mix, as essentially yielding to his concept of social character.10

Fromm argued that Freud was “the last great representative of rationalism,” whose life ended amid the irrationalism of Hitler, Stalin, and the emerging “shadows of the Holocaust.” Freud’s rationalism led to his discovery of the unconscious and how it operated within dreams, neurotic behavior, character traits, myths, religion, and especially early childhood experiences. Simultaneously, Freud struck a blow at rationalism by showing that conscious thought controlled only a small measure of human behavior—that man was dominated by an “underworld” of powerful irrational forces. By underscoring both the rational and irrational in the human condition, Fromm insisted that Freud had culminated “the most important trend in Western thought since the seventeenth century: the attempt to rid man of the illusions which veil and distort reality.” In this essential task, Freud was congruent with Marx.¹¹

Fromm noted that Freud suffered from an acute sense of insecurity, and this deficit caused him to “seek to control others who depend on him, so that he can depend on them.” That is, Freud’s insecure craving for recognition and fame caused him to seek a loyal following that embraced his every thought and position: “Freud’s pursuit of a blind following made for the long-term intellectual sterility of his movement … dogma, ritual and idolization of the leader replaced creativity and spontaneity.” Dissenters such as Adler, Rank, and Jung were ostracized.¹²

Fromm devoted much of Freud’s Mission to four “inherent errors and limitations” in the development of the psychoanalytic movement. First, it suffered from “the very defect it aims at curing: repression.” Freud and his followers repressed their ambition “to conquer the world with a messianic ideal of salvation,” and this repression produced many “ambiguities and dishonesties.” Second, because Freud had spawned an authoritarian movement run by an entrenched bureaucracy, there was nobody to elaborate and modify creatively the gaps in his theory of human motivation. Third, Freud’s greatest discovery—the human unconscious—tended to be limited to an explication of libidinal strivings and their repressions. Freud often made little of the wider social and political aspects of human existence. Fourth, neither Freud nor his followers were able to transcend their “liberal middle class attitude toward society.” They remained prisoners of this limited worldview and could never offer penetrating criticism of the dominant values of the society in which they lived. For Fromm, this detachment and capacity for solid social criticism was what Marx added to Freudian drive theory.13

Freud’s Mission was more an extended philippic than a closely reasoned or well-researched manuscript. Conclusions were postulated without much evidence or reasoning. In fact, Fromm acknowledged that he had not covered the topic adequately and planned an extended multivolume study, but this was never written. Nevertheless, it represented his most explicit reckoning with Freud. In a sense, it had the quality of two prophets locked in intense conversation.

Fromm used Marx’s Concept of Man to argue that the young Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts filled Freud’s conceptual gaps by offering a thoroughgoing critique of the capitalist society and values that orthodox Freudians had uncritically accepted. Fromm found Marx deeply sensitive to inner, and often unconscious, psychological motivation. Indeed, Fromm’s Marx was essentially a socialist humanist and a formulator of what he called “productive social character.” Purportedly, Marx had been far more than an economic determinist and materialist aiming to abolish private property and funnel wealth from the capitalist to the worker. Soviet leaders and scholars had “misused” the essential Marx to justify what Fromm characterized as their conservative state bureaucratic capitalism. But the greatest ignorance and distortion of Marx the humanist occurred in the United States. If Marx was to be rescued from both Cold War antagonists and used to guide the world to a saner “third way” alternative, Fromm insisted, he needed to be presented free of Soviet and American distortions.14

In characterizing the 1844 Marx, Fromm was essentially expounding his own prophetically tinged credo for the 1960s. Marx’s essential concept was to transform man from an alienated laborer who detested his routine work and consumed to fill a sense of inner emptiness. Estranged man worked simply to have goods and services, not to be a vibrant, loving, creative, and productive entity. For Marx, “true” socialism represented “the emancipation from alienation, the return of man to himself, his self-realization.” Only through humanistic socialism would man cease to be miserable, cease being an estranged cog in the process to enhance productivity and profits for the few; he would transcend the chronic “antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man.” ¹⁵

Fromm concluded his introduction to Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts with discussions of the personal and private Marx. Dismissing the pervasive characterization of Marx as lonely, arrogant, and authoritarian, Fromm postulated that Marx enjoyed a long and happy marriage. He was also a wonderful father “free from any taint of domination,” and his relationship to his children was “as full of productive love as that to his wife.” Purportedly, Marx’s relationship with his colleague, Frederich Engels, was almost frictionless. In sum, Marx exemplified Fromm’s concept of a loving, creative, productive character. He was on very shaky ground with these assertions, for his biographical knowledge of Marx was skeletal. One is pressed to find any evidential base for Fromm’s characterization of Marx as “the productive, non-alienated man whom his writings visualized as the man of a new society.” In fact, Fromm refused to consider what some scholars had concluded—that Marx felt a sense of estrangement from society. But what may have mattered more was that Fromm was trying to counter the demonization of Marx in America and the West as a result of the residues of McCarthyism and the heightened tensions with the Soviet Union.16

Unlike Marcuse’s and Dunayevskaya’s earlier and more ponderous scholarship on the 1844 manuscripts, Marx’s Concept of Man decidedly influenced the American reading public, stimulating a broad-ranging and less stereotypical discussion of the early Marx not only among U.S. scholars and social commentators but also in Newsweek and other mass-media outlets. What this underscored was that Fromm was becoming less a scholar and more a publicist, educating a vast readership on profound ideas and classic books that they might otherwise have missed. His clear and accessible prose helped make this possible. So did his capacity to connect to the culture and values of society at large. This was an important venture he was engaged in and represented one of his most essential “lives.”

Beyond the Chains of Illusion (1962) was Fromm’s fullest effort to present his thoughts on Freud and Marx between two covers. Even more than in Sigmund Freud’s Mission and Marx’s Concept of Man, however, Fromm made the elaboration of their thoughts secondary to the development and explication of his own prophesies. Here he presented his approach to psychoanalysis as a social-psychological one, fusing his clinical and philosophical ideas. If man was to invoke his powers of reason to cultivate a happy, creative, productive life, Fromm insisted, he must eliminate illusions that obscured reality. Freud and Marx became Fromm’s modalities for transcending illusions and addressing life’s basic issues.

Although Fromm was disenchanted with orthodox Freudians, he credited Freud more generously than he had in Freud’s Mission for promoting a new level of understanding of the human condition. Indeed, Fromm never began a book or article before first determining Freud’s position on the topic. Freud had “postulated that man can become aware of the very forces which act behind his back—and that in becoming aware of them he enlarges the realm of freedom and is able to transform himself from a helpless puppet moved by unconscious forces to a self-aware and free man who determines his own destiny.”17

In Beyond the Chains of Illusion, Fromm went beyond Freud’s Mission in one important particular, insisting that though Freud had focused on the individual unconscious, he was also concerned with the social unconscious. Indeed, Fromm credited Freud with establishing that human character was dynamic and social. Character consisted of an interactive system of underlying strivings inherent in both the self and the society. In effect, Freud had given Fromm the basis for his concept of social character. For Fromm, Freud had shown how “man acts and thinks according to his character,” which was represented in the active, changing structure of the energy system within him. Fromm’s concept of social character consisted of the instinctual energy within the self that Freud had emphasized, but that energy was then shaped and reshaped by external social structures to the point where instinct and social structure were inseparable. Fromm and Freud diverged here as Fromm underscored an interesting conceptual interplay, and, most important, he modified but did not eliminate the centrality of instinctive life. Many who have written on Fromm have missed this point.¹⁸

Praising Freud in Beyond the Chains of Illusion as “the founder of a truly scientific psychology,” Fromm continued to characterize Marx as a thinker with “much greater depth and scope than Freud.” Whereas Freud’s talking cure could induce profound individual change by exposing the tangled internal webs of a person’s libidinal organization and by enhancing ego strength, Marx found reality in the total socioeconomic structure of society. Whereas Freud had been “a liberal reformer” defending the individual’s “natural drives against the forces of social convention,” Marx issued a revolutionary prescription for society’s ills. Unlike Freud, Marx delineated the psychologically crippling effect of class exploitation inherent in capitalism and “thus could have a vision of the un-crippled man and the possibilities for his development, once society had become entirely human.” The more man worked at tasks that had no bearing on his unique human qualities while enhancing the profits of the “propertied classes,” the more man lost a sense of himself and became alienated from life generally and from others. The estrangement from the workplace extended to an estrangement from society and from life itself. Whereas Freud helped Fromm the clinician working with a patient to ease libidinal repression, Marx helped Fromm, the democratic socialist, propound an alternative to a repressive class-based society.19

What was needed to restore humanity to man? Freud’s path (i.e., helping the individual come to grips with his inner repressions), while exceedingly useful, was insufficient. Fromm construed Marx’s prescription of communism as essentially strong support for socialist humanism. Marx recognized that man “is only complete as a man, if he is related to his fellow men and to nature.” Only that free and open relationship (not sustained by class distinctions or the exploitations inherent in the capitalist marketplace) would make man happy, and this could transpire when the economic base of society was transformed (i.e., when socialism was achieved). Drawing on aspects of Zen Buddhism as well as Marx, Fromm posited that man would then be free to cultivate all of his potentialities in relation to others and to nature. As he summarized to his friend, Father Thomas Louis Merton, Marx was propounding “a non-theistic mysticism like Zen Buddhism” that would overcome “the subject-object split” and thereby facilitate a deep “union between man and man, and man and nature.” Not entirely a restatement of Marx, this constituted one of Fromm’s prophetic visions.²⁰

Nonetheless, Fromm refused to distinguish himself conceptually from Marx and acknowledged to Merton that this was by design. Fromm was essentially quoting Marx at length and equated this material with his standard if vague conceptualizations of the good society: humanism, productive social character, and the art of loving. Put succinctly, in Beyond the Chains of Illusion Fromm fused his own social psychology with what he considered to be the core of Marx’s. Fromm augmented this position with the most valuable aspects of the Freudian corpus: the concept of the unconscious, the dynamic quality of human character, and the broad efficacy of psychoanalytic clinical techniques. Not entirely blending Marx and Freud, Fromm extracted elements from both, concluding the book with his distinctive credo. He was a Marxist and still fully a Freudian, but above all, he had become a “Frommian,” drawing on his own preexisting prophetic formulations.²¹

Fromm underscored this perspective in a 1960 pamphlet drafted for the American Socialist Party: Let Man Prevail: A Socialist Manifesto. Since his years in Weimar Germany, he had regarded himself as a democratic socialist. But he had not been active in socialist politics until 1958, when he joined the American Socialist Party. Although Fromm was impressed by Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party’s longstanding leader, the organization had not regained the vibrancy and influence it had enjoyed earlier in the century. Prompted by Thomas’s quest for organizational revitalization, Fromm was assigned to prepare a position paper in pamphlet form so that party members and socialists generally could gain a clearer sense of their goals. While drafting and amplifying the Manifesto, Fromm tested the message on college student audiences and wrote to Karl Polanyi of “the very favorable response” of 1,200 at Yale and over two thousand at the University of Chicago. The students were swayed by his humanist socialist vision over the bleak alternatives of “Western capitalism and communist Khrushchevism,” for it promised to save humankind from its most destructive dispositions.²³

Fromm’s Manifesto was a polemic for what he referred to as “a third solution”; the pamphlet asserted but did not demonstrate its essential arguments. He rejected both the “managerial free enterprise system” of America and the West generally and the “managerial communist system” of the Soviets and their allies; both deprived man of his spiritual essence as they drove the world toward nuclear extinction. Insisting that both Western market capitalism and Soviet state-managed capitalism negated man’s creativity and happiness and bypassed “the spiritual tradition of humanism,” Fromm considered the “free enterprise system” of the West as the less degrading of the two because it allowed more civil liberties and greater political rights.24

For Fromm, the biggest problem with managed free enterprise and “a vulgarized distorted socialism” was that they were both entirely materialistic, placing economic gain above reverence for human life. Moreover, both had paralyzed human rationality to the point where the pride in a common humanity had subsided and a nuclear war destroying millions had become a probability. “It is clear,” Fromm warned, “that atomic armament is likely to lead to universal destruction and, even if atomic war could be prevented, that it will lead to a climate of fear, suspicion, regimentation, which is exactly the climate in which freedom and democracy cannot live.” In both systems, thinking was so divorced from human feeling that “people tolerate the threat of an atomic war hovering over all mankind.” ²⁵

Fromm concluded his Manifesto by underscoring the benefits of socialist humanism and its potential to lead humankind away from the precipice of nuclear obliteration. Socialist humanism sought peace between nations and worked to outlaw nuclear war under any conditions. It valued “greater freedom and human growth” over greater economic production: “all production must be directed by the principle of its social usefulness, and not by that of its material profit for some individuals or corporations.”²⁶

Fromm’s Manifesto was more than a proclamation of broad humanist goals. It also offered lists of reforms for the party to consider, such as racial and gender equality, guarantees for religious freedom, fuller separation of church and state, “measures in the direction of socialized medicine,” and the expansion of general government assistance for the unemployed, the infirm, and the elderly. Fromm also wanted the Socialist Party to promote government support for the arts and for services in all areas where private sector initiatives were lacking. This was a strong and vibrant domestic agenda for realistic reform within existing institutional arrangements, but it fell far short of being revolutionary.²⁷

Fromm’s most compelling recommendations for a Socialist Party platform were in the area of peacekeeping. Embracing an ideological and prophetic stance, he called for the abolition of “any kind of armed forces” and a “commonwealth of nations” more powerful than the United Nations to gradually replace national sovereignty. This was a far more radical position than he had adopted with respect to his domestic agenda. In the interim, Fromm sought continuous disarmament negotiations, for the only “way to avoid total destruction lies in total disarmament.” The Socialist Party was to stand for negotiations between the United States and the Soviets, following a basic formula: that “the two power blocs accept their present economic and political positions and renounce every attempt to change them by force.”28

Fromm’s Manifesto had problematic aspects, for the specific measures he proposed were pegged first to the United States and then only toward the other more prosperous industrial societies. He insisted that the American Socialist Party be a decentralized democratic body with free and open participation in decision making by all members. Yet he advanced a general philosophy for the party and positions on specific issues that were beyond challenge or debate and were to be accepted as a matter of course. Fromm the democrat clashed with Fromm the all-controlling prophet. In addition, he failed in the Manifesto to draw on the past history, workings, and considerable accomplishments of the American Socialist Party, as if it had no past. Rather than describing the concrete texture of the party’s daily operations, Fromm articulated his own vague and utopian vision of the general nature of humanist socialism. The process of drafting the document made clear that Fromm had difficulty working politically with others within the structures of an organization. Although the party’s national chairman offered copies of Fromm’s platform to the membership, it was never adopted as the formal party position, not least because he did not consult with party leaders as he drafted it.²⁹

Fromm, acutely fearful of the possibility of nuclear war, had read C. Wright Mills’s prediction in The Causes of World War Three (1958) that thermonuclear conflict between the superpowers was an “insane” likelihood. By mid-1961, Fromm predicted that man might not prevail. An acute crisis over the control of Berlin occurred in the middle of the year as preparations were made to build a wall separating the eastern and western zones of the city. Soviet Premier Khrushchev threatened to sign a treaty with the East German government ending American, British, and French access to West Berlin. In response, President Kennedy ordered an increase in American troop strength and a domestic bomb shelter program. For Fromm, Kennedy’s response to Khrushchev’s provocation exemplified a misguided American deterrence theory. Fromm’s book was intended to emphasize its folly.

The premise behind American policy, Fromm noted, was that there was a relatively homogeneous communist camp (the USSR and China) “out to conquer the world by force or subversion.” The threat of a crippling response would be a deterrent, or so the logic went. Fromm asserted that America’s deterrence policy threatened a nuclear exchange. What he did not consider was that the shapers of American policy were considering other possibilities if deterrence failed. That is, he did not factor in that several of them had pondered the same risky state of affairs that he had. ³¹

To demonstrate the folly of American deterrence policy, Fromm devoted much of May Man Prevail? to an interesting if sometimes problematic interpretation of the evolution of the Soviet Union, building his case on a good deal of Russian history and translations of policy documents of the Soviet leadership that had made their way to the West and often published in the New York Times. With these limited sources, Fromm fashioned himself a reporter to the West on the way the Soviet elite operated. With firmer academic ties, he might have gained a foothold in the emerging field of Soviet studies, with colleagues to acquaint him with more restricted documents, scholarly articles, and in-house analyses, therefore giving him a more nuanced understanding. But Fromm’s distance from the academy had always posed such a limitation. From his circumscribed knowledge base, Fromm postulated that the Soviet Union had evolved into a conservative centralized managerial society not wholly unlike Western capitalist nations. Soviet leaders were far more interested in internal economic growth than in exporting socialist revolution or contesting the West militarily. This was Fromm’s appraisal of the Soviet state, and he stuck doggedly to it, with minimal exploration of other interpretive possibilities. The chain of events that fashioned this managerial society began, Fromm claimed, when Stalin assumed power in the late 1920s and followed his basic aim to establish a highly industrialized, centralized Russian nation through totalitarian state planning, so that Russia could quickly become the dominant industrial power in Europe. After the death of Lenin, Stalin organized a reign of terror to eliminate Trotsky and the old Bolsheviks who opposed “his transformation of the socialist goal into one of reactionary state managerialism.” It took Stalin thirty years to transform Russia from an economically backward nation into an economic power. But the costs were horrendous, Fromm concluded: slave labor camps, arbitrary arrests of dissenters, and a police state.32

Fromm acknowledged that he had been “a rather fanatical anti-Communist” during Stalin’s reign “because of my deep indignation about the inhumanity which, to me, was the same in Stalin’s system as in Hitler’s.” The Soviet state had evolved into “a Conservative industrial bureaucracy, which I dislike for its conservatism and its stuffiness, but against which I have no feelings of emotional indignation.” The Soviet elite severely limited political freedom, to be sure, and they ran a “reactionary welfare state.” But Fromm assumed that the more it satisfied the material needs of its population, the more it might shed police-state tactics. Run by an overlapping industrial, political, and military bureaucracy, the Soviets had completed a “managerial revolution” but not a socialist one.³³

American Cold War deterrence theory assumed that the Soviet Union was an aggressive expansionist power seeking world domination through military and economic adventurism and that this must be countered by a Western display of resistance. If the Soviet threat was sufficiently forceful, America and its Western allies would threaten to deploy nuclear weapons. The problem, Fromm argued, was that this posture was blind to the disparity between the professed communist revolutionary ideology of the Soviets under Khrushchev and the reality of “conservative state managerialism.” Because the Soviet ruling elite was preoccupied with internal concerns—recovering from the devastation of World War II, developing the country’s natural resources, averting economic crises and unemployment, and satisfying consumer demands—they were uninterested in a humanist socialist system and sought only to enhance the management of material resources. They had no interest in exporting revolution abroad or in procuring global domination. Khrushchev’s preference was to reduce or eliminate the Cold War arms race so as to free up resources for his domestic economy: “What he needs is peace, a reduction in the armaments burden, and unquestioned control over his own system,” especially given America’s superior military power.34

Fromm found confirmation for his portrayal of Khrushchev’s Russia from a document that the Soviet Communist Party released in mid-1961 and that the New York Times translated, published, and characterized as “a new declaration of war against the free world,” owing to its alarmist Marxist-Leninist proclamation for communist victory over the West. More circumspect, Fromm examined the context and crucial language within the document and pointed out that in the specific text the party program was not calling for world revolution. In fact, the document contained a mixture of oversimplified Marxist and Leninist thought, welfare-state ideals mixed with the values of the capitalist marketplace, rigid Victorian morality, and a Calvinist work ethic. The Soviets had, in fact, asserted that “socialism” would win not by war but by “the example of a more perfect social organization” that yielded “economic superiority.” Most importantly, the party program suggested that global peace and coexistence were required for the realization of its economic and social goals. As Fromm summarized, the party required peaceful coexistence to assure the better “organization of a centrally directed state economy, and [to increase] the material satisfaction for its inhabitants.” Far from advocating global destruction, Fromm insisted that the Soviet text revealed encouraging signs of commitment to world peace. ³⁵

May Man Prevail? addressed another concern for American policy makers: China. If Russia under Khrushchev was a modestly prosperous status quo power, Fromm saw China congruent with the nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America emerging from colonialism, embracing nationalism, and pushing hard for industrialization. A peasant society short on material resources and financial capital, China had turned to human capital “by centrally organizing and directing the physical energy, the passions and the thoughts of its inhabitants.” To discipline the work force through communitarian production and minimal consumption, the Chinese leadership turned to what Robert Jay Lifton later characterized as “thought reform,” which was quite distinct from the Stalinist liquidation of dissidents. All values of individualism and free thought were scorned as the “evil” within man, Fromm explained.36

For Mao Tse-tung, Fromm explained, the pace of industrialization had to be accelerated. Hence, foodstuffs necessary to feed the growing population were often exported to help pay for plants and machinery. Mao was determined to transform China into a powerful industrial state and a world power regardless of the human cost. As such, China encouraged “revolutionary” groups in the Third World to throw off ruling elites. With this and other aspects of the Chinese experience in mind, Fromm underscored the problematic nature of equating Russia with China in the making of a “Communist bloc.” Instead, he recognized a schism between the two countries before many other commentators had. Above all, Chinese leaders assumed that nuclear war was a possible if undesirable option and that such a war would be less destructive to their vast and decentralized population of seven hundred million (even if half were killed) than it would be to either the Russians or the Americans.³⁷

Based on very limited sources of information, Fromm dismissed the possibility that China had embraced a policy of large-scale military aggression despite periodic rhetoric about surviving a nuclear exchange. Its leaders had been circumspect in their dealings with South and Southeast Asian nations. America should recognize the Peking government, work to seat it in the United Nations, and support China’s economic needs. A more benevolent Western attitude toward the Peking regime would encourage China to feel more secure about concentrating on its own domestic development while pursuing peace. Essentially, his recommended policy for China was not fundamentally different from the one he advocated toward Russia: conciliation, generosity, and negotiations.³⁸

Actually, Fromm was more worried about Germany than about China. He felt that German postwar rearmament could provoke nuclear confrontations, especially between the United States and Russia. At the onset of the Kennedy presidency, Germany, with its quest to rearm, seemed to be doing just that. Fromm’s colleagues in the German peace movement supplied him with internal German government documents to that effect, documents that the secretary of state lacked, and Fulbright and other U.S. Senate doves drew on his expertise on German affairs. In May Man Prevail? he asked whether Russia was justifiably apprehensive of a rearmed West German Federal Republic and argued that it was. Indeed, he insisted that there was not much point in pursuing Soviet-American peaceful coexistence without a demilitarized West Germany. The faulty premise here was that Fromm assumed that West and East Germany decidedly shaped Soviet and U.S. policies rather than the other way around.39

There was no reason for the Soviets to assume that West Germany lacked aggressive intentions, Fromm argued, though his position seemed more descriptive of the German past than of the postwar period. Since the late nineteenth century, he maintained, German industrialists had pursued raw materials and new markets through military expansion and territorial appropriation. Indeed, the old Junker military class maintained a coalition with these industrialists, and it had been the driving force behind World War I and crucial to Hitler’s expansion in the 1930s and early 1940s.⁴⁰

The United States and its allies wrongly assumed that the German desire for military expansion had ceased with Hitler’s defeat in 1945, Fromm argued. With de-Nazification and postwar West German political leadership launching an “economic miracle” and establishing a democratic state, American foreign policy elites and their allies hoped that a rearmed West Germany might counterbalance potential Soviet expansion. But the old military-industrial alliance was alive in the Adenauer government, Fromm argued. Generals from West Germany’s Bundeswehr were demanding atomic weapons and an enlarged navy, negotiating for military bases in Spain, and hoping to restore lost territories. Given the readiness of Germany to attack Russia only a few decades earlier, it was hardly surprising that the Soviets should feel threatened by the powerful country to its west. Why did Britain and the United States fail to see, Fromm asked, that “a new powerful Germany … could turn against the West just as well as against the East”? Fromm’s focus on Germany more than the Soviets or even China as the major military concern for the United States in the postwar world was problematic at best.⁴¹

May Man Prevail? contained an explicit program that Fromm hoped would form the basis of a new American foreign policy devoted to preventing a nuclear war: “the very situation of two powers prepared to destroy each other if and when necessary, creates a considerable probability for the decision to start a war by either side, even though both would prefer to avoid it.” Accidents, miscalculations, military escalations, or actions by desperate third nations would eventually provoke military leaders on either side to launch a nuclear attack. To avert this disaster, Fromm insisted, in a prophetic tone, that America must take steps to dismember its nuclear arsenal with the expectation of Soviet reciprocity. Like C. Wright Mills three years earlier, Fromm insisted that such a bold American initiative was nowhere as risky as the continuation of the arms race: “to believe that a strategy of mutual threats with ever-more destructive weapons can, in the long run, prevent a nuclear war, and that a society following this road could preserve its democratic character, is a great deal more unrealistic.” Fromm’s argument was logical, to be sure, but it excluded other possibilities. As it happened, care, self-restraint, curtailed, provocations, and a continuous dialogue between the major powers avoided a nuclear war even as Fromm had assumed otherwise. In addition, as Charles O. Lerche Jr. and other specialists on the Cold War have suggested, by the early 1960s both the Soviets and the Americans were moving haltingly toward an implicit understanding. Since neither had any hope of success in a first strike against the other, both countries realized that there was no point in deploying nuclear weapons. There are serious flaws in these retorts to Fromm, to be sure. Neither the Soviets nor the Americans could dissuade China, halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons, or guarantee against miscalculations. It was problematic to assume that rationality would always reign. In both the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the major powers very nearly went to war. Perhaps by sheer luck and some common sense in the higher ranks of leadership, peace was maintained.42

Fromm recognized that his proposal for continuous and mutual arms reduction called for measures to improve the general relationship between the two powers. The most effective plan was through “the mutual recognition of the status quo, the mutual agreement not to change the existing political balance of power between the two blocs.” America and its allies needed to abandon their challenges to Soviet hegemony over its Eastern European “satellite” countries and interests, and the Soviets had to accept U.S. spheres of influence in Western Europe and the Americas. If the greatest point of Soviet-American tension was over Germany and especially Berlin, Fromm maintained, Western acknowledgement of Soviet control over the East could alleviate Russian fears of a reunited and fully rearmed German nation.⁴³

Despite his undue emphasis on the German threat, Fromm’s focus through much of his book was accurate. With the Soviets and the Americans in productive negotiations, it would be less difficult for the superpowers to respect the nonaligned status of countries in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and even Europe. India, Egypt, and Yugoslavia underscored this point; they were pursuing a humanistic democratic socialism that was neither like American capitalism nor Soviet state managerialism nor Chinese “anti-individualistic communism.” These nonaligned countries required massive aid without strings attached from the major powers in order to jumpstart their economies. When that transpired, Fromm believed, these countries would be free to pursue their nonaligned “third force” agendas congruent with their conditions and traditions. This would further dissipate Soviet-American tension.44

Fromm was exceedingly hopeful of the “third way” or “third force” experiment in democratic socialism and saw its potential in so-called underdeveloped countries. Unlike the West, the Soviets, or the Chinese, ventures in humanistic democratic socialism appealed to “the sense of self-respect, individual initiative, social responsibility, and the pride of the individual.” It simultaneously promised economic growth comparable to Russia’s rigidly centralized bureaucratic system. Yugoslavia, for example, had already reached an annual industrial growth rate equivalent to Russia’s. Moreover, the success of democratic socialism in parts of the “underdeveloped” world purportedly undermined the Russian and Chinese claims that their systems were ideal models. Like several other parts his book, researched and written in less than a year, Fromm had precious little evidence behind these points. ⁴⁵