Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm

Kevin Durkin brings Erich Fromm's fertile but underutilized thought back into the mainstream of social theoretical thought, while challenging the sufficiency of that very thought itself. Fromm is a vital and largely overlooked contribution to twentieth-century intellectual history, and one who offers a refreshingly reconfigured form of humanism that is capable of reintegrating explicitly humanist analytical categories and schemas back into social theoretical and scientific considerations. Fromm's qualified essentialism and ethical normativism are sensible, viable, and desirable, and these aspects, coupled with his psychoanalytic social psychology provide the basis for the development of practical strategies to realize humanism in the world. Through a forensic analysis of the Judaic roots of Fromm's thinking and their secular extension via the thought of Marx and Freud, as well as his theoretical divergences from his Frankfurt School ex-colleagues, Durkin shows a serious return to Fromm will encourage renewed theorizing of, and empirical engagement with, the connections between the psychological and the social, the essential and the constructed, and the is and the ought.