Erich Fromm (1900–1980) — Daily Philosophy

The unconscious forces that shape our societies

Erich Fromm: Life and personality

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) was a German social psychologist and philosopher who had enormous popular success from the 1950s all the way to the end of his life in 1980. As I mentioned before, I believe that we can understand a lot about how particular philosophers’ theories came about by studying their lives. Similarly to and Bertrand Russell (of whom we talked before), Erich Fromm’s life also holds important clues to his later philosophy and social theory.

Born into an orthodox Jewish family in Germany right at the beginning of the 20th century, Fromm experienced all the perverse hatred and violence of the human psyche directly in his own life. In 1934, Fromm was forced to leave Nazi Germany and went first to Switzerland and later to New York, where he started a career as a university professor that brought him to various institutes and universities in the US and Mexico, and finally back to Switzerland, where he also died.

Much of his later work was focused on understanding exactly how such phenomena as the Nazi state could come about and how perfectly sane people could, in a short period of time, be turned into a raging horde of savage killers.