Introduction: Erich Fromm’s Global Public Sociology

As a practice and a vision, public sociology has swept through the discipline in the years since Michael Burawoy's 2005 call for action in his speech, ‘For Public Sociology’. The German critical theorist Erich Fromm was among the most creative, visible, and influential practitioners of public sociology in the middle of the twentieth century until his death in 1980. The great American theorist Robert Merton taught Fromm's classic book Escape from Freedom in sociology courses at Columbia University and Fromm was widely cited in the top sociology journals in the Cold War era. Fromm was the author of a number of best-selling works of social science, selling millions of books in the age of the paperback well before the internet and social media. Yet his work is largely unmentioned among the canonical figures of the craft of public sociology such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Jane Addams, C. Wright Mills, and David Riesman. Born in 1900 and brought up in Germany, he lived in the United States and Mexico for decades while enjoying a massive global influence, particularly in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. Fromm is an important part of the history of global public sociology. As the global neo-liberal consensus collapses in the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, Fromm's public sociology should be celebrated and renewed both within our discipline and in the broader public imagination. Fromm earned a PhD at Heidelberg University in the department of national economy with a specialization in sociology under the supervision of Alfred Weber, Max Weber's younger brother. Centrally involved in the Frankfurt School of critical theory (Bronner, 1994; McLaughlin, 1999, 2008; Wheatland, 2009), Fromm worked closely in the 1930s with Robert Lynd in the Columbia sociology department, one of earliest proponents of public sociology who argued passionately that we need to ask ‘knowledge for what?’ (Lynd, 1939). Fromm's Escape from Freedom revolutionized how scholars understood the social psychology of fascism, putting an analysis of what Anthony Giddens later called ‘ontological insecurity’ at the centre of the historical social psychology of extremism (Giddens, 1990; Thorpe, 2020). Written in wartime while Hitler ruled Germany, the book made Fromm famous and established an important tradition of thought about the authoritarian character and sociology of emotions in politics that is all too relevant today.

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