Fromm’s Political Activism in the 1960s

Just after The Art of Loving brought celebrity fame, Fromm entered into an intense decade of activism. Fromm was not directly involved in sustained political activism for most of his life. Beginning in the mid-1950s and lasting for more than a decade until he was sixty-eight years old, Fromm began a long personal campaign for nuclear disarmament, human rights, global peace, humanistic socialism, presidential electoral politics, and the protests to end the brutality of the American war in Vietnam. The increasing danger of nuclear war that careful observers of Soviet– Chinese and US tensions could not fail to notice in the Cold War period pushed Fromm into action. Fromm would sustain his activist work for a decade. Fromm's active clinical practice and involvement in the institutional life of both the Frankfurt School and various psychoanalytic institutes, along with teaching and his active publishing regime, left him little time to be politically active. By the time he moved to Mexico City in 1950, Fromm was busy taking care of a gravely ill wife, involved in the practical and factional political work of the Mexican Psychoanalytic Institute he had established, and travelling for regular part-time university teaching at various universities in the United States (Friedman, 2013; Funk, 2019). Fromm had been attempting to cut back his formal responsibilities at the Mexican Psychoanalytic Society and Institute for a number of years (Friedman, 2013 p 292) and in 1965 retired from the National Autonomous University. This left him more time for politics as well as writing. Fromm was never what Burawoy calls an organic public sociologist who worked to represent his class, racial, or ethnic group or political ideology with roots in local communities, political parties, or social movement organizations. His most important political activism started after he was already world famous as a political intellectual, a status that changes one's relationship to mass publics. Financially independent and wealthy enough by that time (Friedman tells us Fromm's income tripled after The Art of Loving ), Fromm became a significant philanthropist for various human rights causes, electoral campaigns, and political organizations. He was at his most politically active in the United States and Eastern and Central Europe from around 1955 to 1966, driving himself to his first heart attack while undertaking frantic anti-war activism.

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