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Exposing Totalitarianism — The Paradox of Freedom

Investigating Erich Fromm’s critique of totalitarianism.

Photo by mahdi rezaei on Unsplash

The rise of the 20th century totalitarian regimes in the West was a peculiar phenomenon. The human rights movement and the first wave of democratization were among the great trends of the early 20th century. Nevertheless, it beggars belief that these celebrated emancipatory trends did not prevent the totalitarian movements from gaining enormous popularity.

One could almost argue that the progress of freedom in terms of basic liberties during the early 20th century was quite paradoxical. Erich Fromm, a German-born social psychologist and philosopher, was among the earliest to give notice to this seemingly paradoxical phenomenon.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Fromm did not try to explain totalitarianism as a philosophical or ideological phenomenon. Instead, he paid great attention to the grassroots. Namely, to the laypeople’s psychological relationship to freedom and why that relationship backfired. In this article, I mean to explore further this paradoxical relationship.

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Fromm was an accomplished intellectual in many fields. He not only represented the psychoanalytical…