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immediate material praxis. He had distanced himself from existing radical movements, even calling the police on student protestors occupying his office ( Adorno and Marcuse, 1999 : 125). Yet, the Frankfurt School was always larger than Adorno; simultaneously, other critical theorists, such as Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, took different stances. Marcuse famously supported the
Critical theory once offered a powerful, distinctive approach to social research, enabling sociologists to diagnose the irrationalities of the social world across institutions and forms of thought, even within the subject’s deepest desires. Yet, with the work of Axel Honneth, such analytical potency has been lost. The ‘domestication’ of critical theory stems from the programme’s embrace of Honneth’s ‘recognition-cognitivist’ understanding of social problems; where all social maladies are understood to lie, ultimately, within the head of social subjects and within the intersubjective relationships they enact. This book explores the manifold limitations of this dominant understanding of social pathologies and builds towards an alternate theoretical infrastructure, drawn from a marriage of insights from Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse. While Honneth’s critical theory leads to researchers exploring all social problems as ‘pathologies of recognition’, a return to Fromm and Marcuse reminds critical theorists that power precedes subjectivation and that a wide range of pressing social problems exists which are invisible to the recognition framework. As such, this book urges critical theorists to once again think beyond recognition.
In the last chapter, I argued that Erich Fromm’s work can form the basis for a reconceptualisation of social pathology, enabling Frankfurt School researchers to move beyond their current ‘recognition-cognitive’ approach to social research. In place of the dominant vein of critical theory which invests in the norms of neoliberalism (as criticised
argue that one way this can be achieved is through a nuanced reconstruction of Erich Fromm’s and Herbert Marcuse’s social theory. Renewing critical theory matters as it offers the vehicle for an explicitly normative critique of the social world, precisely when the subject’s capacity for, and inclination towards, critical thought is waning. Yet, as Marcuse wrote in his preface to One Dimensional Man
Nonetheless, there is no question that the Studien confirmed the Institute's interest in psychoanalysis. The influence of Erich Fromm here was pivotal. While there was enormous intellectual resistance to this embrace of psychoanalytic elements outside the Institute, the socio-psychoanalytic approach Fromm developed in this period became extremely influential later, inside and outside the academy, most notably in Escape from Freedom (1941). However, by that time he had parted with the Institute. 12
supposed that there were links between people’s sexual behaviour and their political preferences. This supposition had its basis in the Freudian idea that people’s sexual behaviour provided vital clues to their inner personality and character. Wilhelm Reich, in The Mass Psychology of Fascism ( 1933 ), contended that in fascism, individuals found a compensatory outlet for their sadomasochistic and aggressive behaviour that was rooted, in turn, in bourgeois sexual repression. 8 Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom (1941), too, argued that people fled from bourgeois
School scholars, the entire form of social being needs to be open to critique ( Honneth, 2000 : 121). As such, critical theorists possess the conceptual tools required for a ‘thicker’ form of critique. Accordingly, in the critical theories of Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, society was not merely ‘unjust’, ‘illegitimate’, or ‘unfair’; it was critiqued on the basis of its
-Marx’ Marxist pleiade. There is much twentieth-century scholarship that has enormous significance for us, including the work of György Lukács, Mikhail Lifshitz, Evald Ilyenkov, Jean-Paul Sartre, Erich Fromm, and other creative, humanist Marxist and Marxisant writers. Although almost all of us keep a distance from analytical Marxism and are somewhat closer to the Praxis school, we are inclined to dialogue critically and selectively with left-wing postmodernism. While we take a similar attitude to the theoreticians of Western social democracy, we are far
from the original discourse on sadistic tendencies. Erich Fromm demonstrates that there are three variations of classical sadism. The first includes the need to attain absolute power over another entity; the second, a struggle for power combined with the impulse to exploit others; the third variation includes the wish to make others suffer and to observe their anguish. As some may observe, such a satisfaction in the suffering of others corresponds to traits found in contemporary Dominants in the
understanding of disillusionment came only later, with social scientists associating periods of social change with increasing possibilities for self-reflection and reassessment of one’s social and political environment. Peter Sloterdijk’s studies on cynicism are one such example,11 along with Jose Ortega Y Gasset,12 31 32 REVOLUTION, DEMOCRATIC TRANSITION AND DISILLUSIONMENT Erich Fromm,13 Ghita Ionescu14 and Charles Taylor ’s15 work on disillusionment and self-reflection in modernity. The recent engagements with the question of hope within the Central and Eastern