Erich Fromm (1900-1980) was a German social psychologist and philosopher who criticised modern capitalist society on the basis of Marxist and Freudian arguments. He is known for his books discussing how to create better societies and his analysis of love.
This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.
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Erich Fromm: Life and personality
Erich Fromm (1900-1980) was a German social psychologist and philosopher who had enormous popular success from the 1950s all the way to the end of his life in 1980. As I mentioned before, I believe that we can understand a lot about how particular philosophers’ theories came about by studying their lives. Similarly to Aristotle and Bertrand Russell (of whom we talked before), Erich Fromm’s life also holds important clues to his later philosophy and social theory.
Born into an orthodox Jewish family in Germany right at the beginning of the 20th century, Fromm experienced all the perverse hatred and violence of the human psyche directly in his own life. In 1934, Fromm was forced to leave Nazi Germany and went first to Switzerland and later to New York, where he started a career as a university professor that brought him to various institutes and universities in the US and Mexico, and finally back to Switzerland, where he also died.
Much of his later work was focused on understanding exactly how such phenomena as the Nazi state could come about and how perfectly sane people could, in a short period of time, be turned into a raging horde of savage killers.
He was not alone in analysing and trying to explain the fundamental trauma of the Nazi state and the destruction it brought about. Hannah Arendt, for example, another Jewish survivor of the Nazi years, in her The Origins of Totalitarianism, also tried to explain how totalitarian states come about and how they can gain the acceptance of the masses. And Victor Klemperer analysed the language of the Nazi state in his diaries that were later published as Lingua Tertii Imperii, or, in the English translation, as The Language of the Third Reich.
These are great and wonderful books and it is at our own peril that we have almost forgotten about them today. Our own world is not charmed and magically safe from totalitarianism, and if we want to avoid a repetition of those times, we should learn to be more vigilant and to recognise the early warning signs of a totalitarian society. And such books can give us the means to do just that.
But Erich Fromm was first a doctor and a psychologist, and as such it wasn’t the political structure of totalitarian states or their language that interested him, but the psychological conditions that can cause normal, everyday people to behave in aggressive or self-harming ways. He saw that one cannot explain a society like Nazi Germany’s (or …
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