The German socialist thinker Erich Fromm is an unjustly neglected figure, certainly when compared with his erstwhile Frankfurt School colleagues, such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Fromm’s analysis of authoritarian culture offers what is in many ways a more grounded alternative to the influential theories of Horkheimer and Adorno. It also reveals a distinctly more optimistic and hopeful engagement with the question of radical social change.

Scholarship on the Frankfurt School and critical theory has minimized Fromm’s contribution, continuing a trend that Max Horkheimer himself inaugurated after Fromm’s departure from the Frankfurt Institute in 1939. This has left us with a picture of Frankfurt School critical theory that is rather one-sided, lacking a serious account of Fromm’s thought and his influential critique of authoritarianism.

Fromm’s story shows us that a critique of authoritarian culture — one that identifies the strong tendencies toward passivity and reaction in the general population — can retain its central thrust, while still maintaining some of the optimism of the original Marxian critique of capitalism, and its orientation toward political action here and now.