Introduction: Erich Fromm’s Global Public Sociology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.034 | 0.018 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".