Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium

by Erich Fromm (editor)

The culmination of Fromm's social & political philosophy was his book The Sane Society, published in 1955, which argued in favor of humanistic & democratic socialism. Building primarily upon the early works of Karl Marx, Fromm sought to reemphasise the ideal of freedom, missing from most Soviet Marxism, & more frequently found in the writings of libertarian socialists & liberal theoreticians. Fromm's brand of socialism rejected both Western capitalism & Soviet communism, which he saw as dehumanizing & that resulted in a virtually universal modern phenomenon of alienation. He became one of the founders of socialist humanism, promoting the early writings of Marx & his humanist messages to the USA & Western European publics.
In the early 1960s, Fromm published two books dealing with Marxist thoughts (Marx's Concept of Man & Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx & Freud). In 1965, working to stimulate the Western & Eastern cooperation between Marxist humanists, Fromm published a series of articles entitled Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium. In 1966, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year.

Genres: Philosophy, Essays, Nonfiction, Political Science

461 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Erich Fromm, Ph.D. (Sociology, University of Heidelberg, 1922) was a German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the United States. He was one of the founders of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City and was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

Fromm explored the interaction between psychology and society, and held various professorships in psychology in the U.S. and Mexico in the mid-20th century.

Fromm's theory is a rather unique blend of Freud and Marx. Freud, of course, emphasized the unconscious, biological drives, repression, and so on. In other words, Freud postulated that our characters were determined by biology. Marx, on the other hand, saw people as determined by their society, and most especially by their economic systems.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books which lay in the shelves for years before I got around to reading it. It may have been given me in high school by an older friend of German-Czech background who knew a lot more than me about international socialist theory. In any case, I was intimidated by it until I'd gotten into reading a lot of Marx and some economics on my own--enough, at least, to attempt to tackle the discussions between this book's covers.

[Marco Filippi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Da leggere.