Abstract
The ideas and reputational history of German psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm are examined as a case study in the sociology of knowledge that explores how intellectual boundaries are constructed within and between disciplines in the modem academy, psychoanalytic institutes, and the journal and book reading publics and among the intellectual elite. The “rise and fall” of Erich Fromm is narrated using the foil of Michèle Lament's analysis of how Derrida became a dominant philosopher and influence on literary criticism. The example of how Fromm became a forgotten intellectual is used to examine various models of how reputations are constructed. My analysis highlights the importance of the sectlike culture of psychoanalysis and Marxism as well as the boundary-maintaining processes of academic disciplines, schools of thought, and intellectual traditions, and suggests a research agenda on orthodoxies and revisionism within intellectual movements more generally.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Adair-Toteff, Christopher 1995 “Ferdinand Tonnies: Utopian visionary.” Sociological Theory 13:58-65.
Alford, Robert and Roger Friedland 1985 The Powers of Theory: Capitalism, the State and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Aronson, Ronald 1995 After Marxism. New York: Guilford Press.
Becker, Ernest 1973 The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press.
Bell, Daniel 1977 “The once and future Marx.” American Journal of Sociology 83:187-197.
Bellah, Robert, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton 1985 Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Benjamin, Jessica 1988 The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon.
Benton, Ted 1984 The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism: Althusser and His Influence. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Blauner, Robert 1964 Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Bloom, Allan 1987 The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Bourdieu, Pierre 1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Brint, Steven 1994 In an Age of Experts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bronner, Stephen Eric 1994 Of Critical Theory and its Theorists. London: Blackwell.
Brown, Norman O. 1959 Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. New York: Vintage Books.
Burnham, John 1988 Paths into American Culture: Psychology, Medicine and Morals. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Burston, Daniel 1991 The Legacy of Erich Fromm. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Buxton, William and Turner, Stephen 1987 “From education to expertise: Sociology as a “profession.” In Terence C. Halliday and Morris Janowitz (eds.), Sociology and Its Publics: The Forms and Fates of Disciplinary Organization: 189-212. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Camic, Charles 1992 “Reputation and predecessor selection: Parsons and the institutionalists,” American Sociological Review 57:421-445.
Campbell, Colin 1995 “Conspicuous confusion? A critique of Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption.” Sociological Theory 13:37-47.
Chancer, Lynn 1992 Sadomasochism in Everyday Life: The Dynamics of Power and Powerlessness. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Chodorow, Nancy 1978 The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press.
1989 Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Clegg, Stuart 1992 “How to become an internationally famous British social theorist.” Sociological Review 40:576-598.
Cole, Jonathan and Cole, Stephen 1971 Measuring the quality of sociological research: Problems in the use of the Science Citation Index.” The American Sociologist 6:23-29.
1973 Social Stratification in Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cortina, Mauricio and Maccoby, Michael, eds. 1996 A Prophetic Analyst: Erich Fromm's Contributions to Psychoanalysis. Northvale, NJ.
Coser, Lewis 1965 Men of Ideas: A Sociologist's View. New York: Free Press.
1984 Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Coser, Lewis, Charles Kadushin, and Walter Powell 1982 Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing. New York: Basic Books.
Crane, Diana 1972 The Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1987 The Transformation of the Avante-Garde: The New York Art World, 1940–1985. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Davies, Scott 1995 “Leaps of faith: Shifting currents in critical sociology of education.” American Journal of Sociology 100:1448-1478.
Dingwall, Robert and Michael King 1995 “Herbert Spencer and the professions: Occupational ecology reconsidered.” Sociological Theory 13:14-24.
Dinnerstein, Dorothy 1976 The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. New York: Harper & Row.
Dobrenkov, V. I. 1976 Neo-Freudians in Search of Truth. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Durig, Alexander 1994 “What did Susanne Langer really mean?” Sociological Theory 12:254-265.
Epstein, Cynthia Fuchs 1987 Deceptive Distinctions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Friedenberg, Edgar 1962 “Neo-Freudianism and Erich Fromm.” Commentary 34:305-313.
Fromm, Erich 1941 Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar and Rhinehart.
1947 Man for Himself: Towards a Psychology of Ethics. New York: Rinehart.
1950 Psychoanalysis and Religion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
1951 The Forgotten Language. New York: Rhinehart.
1955a “The human implications of instinctive radicalism.” Dissent 2:342-349.
1955b The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart.
1956a The Art of Loving. New York: Harper & Row.
1956b “A counter rebuttal.” Dissent 3:81-83.
1959 Sigmund Freud's Mission: An Analysis of His Personality and Influence. New York: Harper and Brothers.
1961a Marx's Concept of Man. New York: Ungar.
1961b May Man Prevail: An Inquiry into the Facts and Fictions of Foreign Policy. New York: Doubleday.
1973 The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
1976 To Have or To Be? New York: Harper & Row.
Fromm, Erich ed. 1965 Socialist Humanism. New York: Doubleday & Company.
Fromm, Erich and Michael Maccoby 1996 Social Character in a Mexican Village. (1970) Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Transaction Press.
Funk, Rainer 1982 Erich Fromm: The Courage to be Human. New York: Continuum.
Gerhardt, Uta 1993 Talcott Parsons on National Socialism. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Goldman, Harvey 1994 “From social theory to sociology of knowledge and back: Karl Mannheim and the sociology of intellectual knowledge production.” 12:266-278.
Goodman, Paul 1945 “The political meaning of some recent revisions of Freud.” Politics 2:197-203.
Greenberg, Jay and Stephen Mitchell 1983 Object Relations in Psychanalytic Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Griswold, Wendy 1986 Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theater, 1576–1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hall, Edward T. 1992 An Anthropology of Everyday Life: An Autobiography. New York: Doubleday.
Hale, Nathan G., Jr. 1995 The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985. New York: Oxford.
Hamilton, Richard F. 1996 The Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Harrington, Michael 1976 The Twilight of Capitalism. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Hausdorf, Don 1972 Erich Fromm. New York: Twayne.
Herman, Ellen 1995 The Romance of an American Psychology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Herrnstein Smith, Barbara 1988 Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell 1983 The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hoffman, Edward 1988 The Right to be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow. Los Angeles: St. Martin's Press.
Horowitz, Daniel 1994 Vance Packard and American Social Criticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Howe, Irving 1982 A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich.
Inkeles, Alex 1963 “Sociology and psychology.” in Sigmund Koch (ed.), Psychology: A Study of a Science, Vol. 6:317-387. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Jacoby, Russell 1975 Social Amnesia: Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing. Boston: Beacon Press.
1987 The Last Intellectuals. New York: Basic.
Jamison, Andrew and Ron Eyerman 1994 Seeds of the Sixties. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Jay, Martin 1973 The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Kadushin, Charles 1974 The American Intellectual Elite. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Kapsis, Robert E. 1992 Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kardiner, Abram 1961 They Studied Men. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company.
Kauppi, Niilo 1996 French Intellectual Nobility: Institutional and Symbolic Transformations in the Post-Sartrian Era. Albany: State University of New York.
Kellner, Douglas 1989 Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press.
Kettler, David and Volker Meja 1994 “That typically German kind of sociology which verges on philosophy”: The dispute about Ideology and Utopia in the United States.” Sociological Theory 12:279-303.
Kurzweil, Edith 1989 The Freudians: A Comparative Perspective. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
1995 Freudians and Feminists. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Lamont, Michèle 1987 “How to become a dominant French philosopher: The case of Jacques Derrida.” American Journal of Sociology 95:584-622.
Lang, Gladys Engel and Kurt Lang 1988 “Recognition and renown: The survival of artistic reputation.” American Journal of Sociology 94:79-109.
1990 Etched in Memory: The Building and Survival of Artistic Reputation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina.
Lasch, Christopher 1979 The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Norton.
Laub, John and Robert Sampson 1991 “The Sutherland-Glueek debate: On the sociology of criminological knowledge.” American Journal of Sociology 96:1402-1440.
Lemert, Charles 1994 A classic from the other side of the veil: Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk.” The Sociological Quarterly 35:385-396.
Lengermann, Patricia and Jill Niebrugge 1995 “Intersubjectivety and domination: A feminist investigation of the sociology of Alfred Schutz.” Sociological Theory 13:25-36.
Lenkerd, Barbara 1994 “Theoretical approach: Erich Fromm's theory of social character as adapted by Michael Maccoby.” In Meanings and Motivations At Work, unpublished Ph.D. thesis dissertation, Anthropology, Catholic University of America.
Lipset, Seymour Martin 1960 Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. New York: Doubleday & Company.
Lukes, Steven 1985 Marxism and Morality. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Maccoby, Michael 1995 “The two voices of Erich Fromm: Prophet and analyst.” Society 32:72-82.
1996 “Introduction to the Transaction Edition of Social Character in a Mexican Village.” Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Transaction Press, pp. ix-xxxi.
Marcuse, Herbert 1955a Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press.
1955b “The social implications of Freudian revisionism.” Dissent 2:221-240.
1956 “A reply to Erich Fromm.” Dissent 3:79-81.
McLaughlin, Neil 1996a “Nazism, nationalism and the sociology of emotions: Escape from Freedom revisited.” Sociological Theory 14:421-261.
1996b Escape from analysis orthodoxy: A sociology of knowledge of the rise and fall of Erich Fromm. Ph.D. dissertation, Sociology, The City University of New York.
1998 “Why do schools of thought fail? Neo-Freudianism as a case study in the sociology of knowledge.” Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 34(2):113-134
Forthcoming “Origin myths in the social sciences: Erich Fromm, the Frankfurt School, and the emergence of critical theory.” The Canadian Journal of Sociology.
Merton, Robert K. 1973 “The Matthew effect in science.” (1968) The Sociology of Science: 439-459. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mitchell, Juliet 1974 Psychoanalysis and Feminism. New York: Vintage.
Mullins, Nicholas 1973 Theories and Theory Groups in Contemporary Sociology. New York: Harper & Row.
Noll, Richard T. 1994 The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Paris, Bernard 1995 Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst's Search for Self Understanding. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Quinn, Susan 1987 A Mind of Her Own: The Life of Karen Horney. New York: Summit.
Richert, John 1986 “The Fromm-Marcuse debate revisited.” Theory and Society 15:351-400.
Riesman, David 1950 The Lonely Crowd. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Roazen, Paul 1974 Freud and His Followers. New York: Knopf.
1990 Encountering Freud: The Politics and Histories of Psychoanalysis. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
1992 “The rise and fall of Bruno Bettelheim.” The Psychohistory Review (Spring): 221-250.
Robinson, Paul 1969 The Freudian Left. New York: Harper & Row.
Rodden, John 1989 The politics of literary reputation: The making and claiming of “St. George” Orwell. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rogow, Arnold 1970 The Psychiatrists. New York: G. P. Putman's Sons.
Sayers, Janet 1991 Mothers of psychoanalysis. New York: Norton.
Schaar, John 1961 Escape from Authority: The Perspectives of Erich Fromm. New York: Basic Books.
Selznick, Philip 1992 The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sica, Alan 1995 “Gabel's micro/macro bridge: The schizophrenic process writ large.” Sociological Theory 13:66-99.
Spindler, George, ed. 1978 The Making of Psychological Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Steinberg, Stephen 1996 Turning Back. Boston: Beacon Press.
Tuchman, Gaye, with Nina Fortin 1986 Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Social Change. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Turkle, Sherry 1992 Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud's French Revolution. New York: Guilford Press.
West, Cornel 1991 The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought. New York: Monthly Review Press.
1994 Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press.
Westkott, Marcie 1986 The Feminist Legacy of Karen Horney. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Whitley, Richard 1984 The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences. Oxford: Claredon.
Wiggershaus, Rolf 1995 The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance. Cambride: MIT Press.
Wolfe, Alan 1989 Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wrong, Dennis 1961 “The oversocialized conception of man.” American Sociological Review 26:183-193.
1994 The Problem of Order: What Unites and Divides Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Znaniecki, Florian 1965 The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge. New York: Octagon Books.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
McLaughlin, N. How to Become a Forgotten Intellectual: Intellectual Movements and the Rise and Fall of Erich Fromm. Sociological Forum 13, 215–246 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022189715949
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022189715949