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.
Author
Erich Fromm, Ph.D. (Sociology, University of Heidelberg, 1922), was a psychoanalyst and social philosopher who 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.
