Social character: Erich Fromm and the ideological glue of neoliberalism
- Several thinkers have expressed the view that the central nostrums of neoliberalism, including self-reliance, personal responsibility and individual risk, have become part of the >common sense< fabric of everyday life. My paper argues that Erich Fromm’s idea of social character offers a comprehensive and persuasive answer to this question. While some have sought the answer to this conundrum in Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I argue that, by itself, this answer is not sufficient. What is significant about the notion of social character, I claim, is that it manages to unify >top-down< approaches like governmentality focused on ideas and policy, with >bottom-up< approaches focused on how the insights of day to day experience are mediated through culture. Adapting this theory to neoliberalism, I argue, means that the >common sense< nature of neoliberalism, and the lack of a reckoning for its massive economic failure (as evidenced by the 2007 Great Recession), are explicable through the formation of a neoliberal social character, by means of which experiential processes align with cultural meanings and, subsequently, fuse with social expectations.
MetadatenAuthor: | R. Foster |
---|
Parent Title (English): | Critical Horizons, Vol. 18, pp. 1-18. |
---|
Document Type: | Articles |
---|
Language: | English |
---|
Year of first Publication: | 2017 |
---|
Release Date: | 2022/05/04 |
---|
Format: | PDF-scan upon request / PDF-Scan auf Anfrage |
---|
IdNo: | Foster_R_2017 |
---|
Writings about Erich Fromm (Secondary Literature): | Articles / Artikel |
---|
Erich Fromm's Library and Erich Fromm Archive: | Articles / Artikel |
---|
Licence (German): | |
---|