The work of Erich Fromm is often overlooked in contemporary feminist thought. Yet important areas of relevance—his critiques of symbiotic love and sadomasochism, advocacy of mutual recognition, and objections to patriarchal presumptions in Freud’s work—render Fromm’s thought useful for feminists. Disadvantages adhere in Fromm’s ideas too, including sexist language and biologically-tinged maternalism. However, this paper reinterprets these problems to advocate for rediscovering both Fromm’s feminist and humanist aspirations.
Erich Fromm is not generally associated with policy positions and politics. Yet, Fromm was an early proponent of guaranteed income as an important practical entitlement necessary if greater human freedoms were to be realized. The article traces the development of the idea of basic (or guaranteed income) in US social movement history going back to the 1960s and including the writings of Erich Fromm on this topic. It argues that the concept of guaranteed income flows easily from, and is consonant with, Fromm’s humanistic philosophy overall. Four reasons are offered, including those that are politically, ethically and pragmatically oriented, as to why providing basic income to all citizens has major advantages over the kind of economic precarity and anxieties that many people currently experience. Lastly, after making a multi-dimensional case for guaranteed income, the article responds to a common objection – namely, if basic income became universally available, people would not wish to work. Quite to the contrary, and as empirical experiments have shown, Fromm’s ideas suggest that guaranteed income would encourage people to work with increased commitment and passion and that more positive than negative consequences would ensue from the concept becoming a widespread and much more generally accepted public policy.
This article continues an earlier one about how the work of Erich Fromm and feminist theories are compatible despite the connection usually remaining overlooked. Drawing on Fromm’s critique of Freud’s analysis of Dora, but also going further, I argue that associating Fromm and contemporary feminist thought is particularly important in the context of growing authoritarianism on the right and sometimes as reflected also on the left. The article elaborates upon five points of ‘psychosocial compatibility’ between Fromm’s humanistic vision and the ideas of several well-known feminist theorists including Simone de Beauvoir, Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin and others. The five points of psychosocial compatibility addressed between From and contemporary feminisms as addressed here are: connecting the personal and the political while stressing the prefigurative; kindred issues concerning objectification and self-love; emphases on relatedness and the pre-oedipal stage of human development; concerns about multi-dimensionality and intersectionality; and shared political beliefs aimed at overcoming gender and other oppressive inequalities.
Erich Fromm has long been a forgotten intellectual despite his status as a major critical theorist and sociologist in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s but his work is being returned to with new enthusiasm because of events in the world, developments within sociology and new interest in psychosocial analysis dealing with emotions. This paper theorizes Fromm's return to scholarly influence now, offering analysis of both his reputational fate in light of the rise of global Trumpism and right wing-populism and the value of the tools his unique merger of Freud, Marx and sociology offers in the contemporary moment.