Abstract: Fromm, Marx, and Humanism [Author’s last version of chapter published in Towards a Human Science: The Relevance of Erich Fromm for Today, edited by Rainer Funk and Neil McLaughlin (Gessen: Psychosozial-Verlag), pp. 209-19] By Kevin B. Anderson BIOGRAPHY Kevin B. Anderson is a Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. He has worked in social and political theory, especially Marx, Hegel, Marxist humanism, the Frankfurt School, Foucault, and the Orientalism debate. Among his recent books are the Rosa Luxemburg Reader (2004, coedited with Peter Hudis) Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (with Janet Afary, 2005), Marx at the Margins (2010), and The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-78 (2012, coedited with Russell Rockwell). In 2000, he and Richard Quinney received the International Erich Fromm Prize in for their edited volume, Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology: Beyond the Punitive Society. He has also published several articles on Fromm and Marxism. ABSTRACT Fromm's early work connecting Marx and Freud as part of the Frankfurt School has gotten inordinate attention, while his later work interpreting Marx as a humanist, democratic, and anti-totalitarian thinker has received short shrift in recent decades. This paper will examine works like Marx's Concept of Man (1961) and Socialist Humanism (1965) in terms of their context, their impact, and the controversies they stirred up with Cold War liberals like Sidney Hook and the young Richard Bernstein. Fromm’s differences with Marcuse over humanism are also explored. In addition, this paper discusses Fromm's correspondence with the Marxist feminist and humanist Raya Dunayevskaya and his connections with Eastern European dissident Marxists. Fromm's persistent dialogue with Marx during the last two decades of his life had a wide impact on the 1960s generation and beyond. At a time when the crisis of capitalism has led to a new interest in Marx, this after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it also speaks to us today. Erich Fromm is often underestimated by critical social theorists and philosophers, who characterize him as a liberal idealist, or as a popularizer who lacked rigor, in contrast to other members of the Frankfurt School like the melancholy Theodor Adorno. None deny, however, that it was Fromm who first introduced the Frankfurt School to a form of Freudian Marxism that was at the root of all of their subsequent efforts to theorize authoritarian personalities.” By the 1950s, with publications like The Art of Loving (1956), Fromm seemed to be entering the American mainstream, perhaps even moving from Marxism to Cold War liberalism as so many others were doing in that period. That was what Marcuse seemed to suggest in his Eros and Civilization (1955), which led to a sharp exchange with Fromm in the left-liberal journal Dissent. However, a closer look at Fromm’s writings in this period shows a far different picture. That same year, in The Sane Society, Fromm began to put forward a humanist interpretation of Marx’s thought, extolling Marx’s humanism as one of the major “answers” to the “decay and dehumanization behind the glamour and wealth and political power of Western society” (1955, p. 205).
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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