The Cold War, Conformity, and the 1960s

At the end of the Second World War, Fromm was a well-known social scientist, psychoanalyst and social critic living in New York City poised to become the most influential public sociologist of his time. Financially secure and no longer constrained by his connection to the Frankfurt School network or to orthodox Freudian sponsorship and institutions, Fromm was well positioned to take his social theory and sociology directly to the public. Fromm was connected to top commercial press editors in New York, their respect earned from the success of Escape from Freedom . Able to write clearly and quickly in English, Fromm entered the period of the height of his fame and influence throughout his forties, fifties, and early sixties. There was a brief moment in the wake of Escape from Freedom 's critical success where Fromm had an opportunity to gain influence inside professional sociology in the United States. Fromm rejected a sustained engagement with the discipline, preferring to write books to mass audiences. Best-selling books from Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (1947), Psychoanalysis and Religion (1950), The Sane Society (1955a), and The Art of Loving (1956a) made Fromm the most visible and important popularizer of the ideas of both Freud and Marx in America in the Cold War era. Fromm had moved from the role of empirical researcher to social critic and public sociologist. Fromm interpreted, popularized, and revised Marx, Freud and the broader European intellectual tradition for Americans in an age of the paperback, mass conformity, and anti-communism. No simplistic popularizer, Fromm outlined a powerful public sociological critique of American capitalism, culture, and militaristic foreign policy. Fromm would shape the politics of the 1960s era in profound ways (Jamison and Eyerman, 1994). Fromm was doing a kind of sociology but one that was in accordance with his ‘intellectual self-concept’ (Gross, 2013). Fromm's ideas were important, but he also provided the single most influential role model – indeed a template – for the public sociologist of the 1950s and 1960s, both for the broader public but also for the sociology profession itself.

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