Matheus Romanetto’s Critique and Affirmation in Erich Fromm

Critique and Affirmation in Erich Fromm radiates intelligence and insight. In addition to being thoughtfully written, meticulously researched, and exceptionally compelling, Matheus Romanetto’s new book is a meaningful contribution to Fromm scholarship. One of its defining features is its depth and breadth: the book covers, in some detail, a wide range of themes, from questions of religion, gender, revolution, ethics, aesthetics, and character to the minutia of the unique ontology implicit in Fromm’s writings. In fact, I would like to suggest that the book’s most important and original contribution to Fromm scholarship consists in its exploration and explication of this unique ontology, which, Romanetto maintains, is crucial for grappling with central Frommian concepts and demonstrating their continued relevance. Put simply, this book’s central innovation is its ontologically driven reconfiguration of our understanding of the significance of and relationship between key Frommian concepts such as love, narcissism, social character, sadism, alienation, productiveness, relatedness, biophilia, repression, the unconscious, etc. This ontology serves as the backdrop to the intellectual journey on which Romanetto takes his readers.

Having brought Fromm into conversation with Marx, Hegel, Freud, Marcuse, and others is among Romanetto’s other accomplishments in this text’s robust, novel engagement with Fromm. Romanetto faithfully compares and contrasts these thinkers’ positions with those held by Fromm on a variety of issues, making the case that Fromm is a natural and worthwhile interlocutor. Another of the book’s feats concerns psychoanalysis. Romanetto teases out and discusses in detail Fromm’s relationship to and innovations within the field, both theoretically and clinically, showcasing his deviations from orthodox psychoanalysis and original insights, and exploring in the process the affinities and divergences of Fromm’s ideas with those of other prominent psychoanalysts, including, for instance, Horney and Ferenczi (162-163). The subject of Fromm’s relationship to psychoanalysis is a fraught one in Fromm scholarship, and Romanetto’s intervention clarifies much. Yet another noteworthy and impressive innovation concerns Romanetto’s re-evaluation of Fromm’s characterological insights, and their relationship to the issue of radicalism, throughout the book through the lens of a latent Frommian ontology. Interestingly, the ontological premises articulated and analyzed here are linked throughout to astute observations about the significance and place of religious ideas (idolatry, the prophetic, etc.) in Fromm’s thought. In chapter 3, for instance, Romanetto notes the influence of the Old Testament prophets on Fromm’s thought and understanding of what it means to be a public intellectual (93). This, I think, is a very important point, as it highlights not only Fromm’s continued rootedness in the Jewish tradition even after he renounced religion, but also the indispensability of the prophetic dimension to Fromm’s secularized thought, ethics, and politics. Romanetto’s reflections on the prophetic component of Fromm’s work suggest that it serves as a kind of bridge between religion and secularism in his thought.

Finally, chapters 6 and 7 offer a new and robust grounding for Fromm’s unique, radical, and hopeful humanism and its entwinement with his political attitudes, actions, and collaborations. In chapter 7 we receive a glimpse of Fromm’s unique ability to balance the imperatives of solidarity, hope and realism in his political life, as well as of the continuing relevance of psychoanalysis to his understanding and interpretation of political phenomena. Here we are also walked through a thorough description of Fromm’s engagements as a public intellectual, the trajectory of his political education, as well as his personal shortcomings and limitations with respect to political organizing and activism. It should also be noted that throughout the book Romanetto offers intriguing reflections on Fromm’s tacit understanding of the relationship between theory and practice, and on its implications for his ethical and political visions. Having said all this, it is my opinion that it would be impossible to do justice to the richness and complexity of this text by reviewing it in its entirety in a few pages. That is why I decided to focus my attention, in the remaining pages, on one of the chapters, chapter 3, which is titled “To Go to the Roots.” One of the most provocative chapters in this book, it delves into the famous Fromm-Marcuse debate, offering in the process an analysis of the relationship between the two thinkers, personal and intellectual, following the Dissent exchange and an attentive consideration of key Frommian and Marcusean ideas. This chapter encapsulates the uniqueness and explosiveness of Fromm’s ideas about politics, ethics, and humanism.

In a beautifully written chapter, Romanetto aims to show that overwhelmingly the evidence, in terms of writing, speeches, interviews, and interactions, points to underlying and irreconcilable differences between Fromm and Marcuse’s intellectual and political positions. These differences should not be understood primarily in terms of disagreement over the interpretation and application of psychoanalytic concepts, which was foregrounded during the famous Dissent exchange, although a close retrospective reading of that debate would reveal that these differences were already present at that juncture, though perhaps they sharpened and deepened with the passage of time. These differences, in which questions of art, ethics, and religion figure prominently, would go on to shape and define Marcuse and Fromm’s respective political commitments and conceptions of revolution and radical social transformation. Interestingly, even as Marcuse’s positions moved closer to Fromm’s own outlook over the years, certain fundamental disagreements continued to linger. One of Romanetto’s many accomplishments in this chapter is the exploration of both the growing convergence of the two thinkers’ views through the years on certain issues and persistent, irreconcilable divergences. For Romanetto, it is unequivocal that it is ultimately the differences that should shape our understanding of the relationship between the two thinkers and their distinctive legacies.

Romanetto opens the chapter by noting that while a surface level reading of the debate between Fromm and Marcuse would suggest that their main disagreements circled around Freud and psychoanalysis, a closer reading of the exchange points to other, more fundamental and enduring kinds of disagreement. At the same time, though this aspect of their encounters is often neglected, even by Fromm and Marcuse themselves, there was in fact much the two theorists agreed on, and as time went on, their positions, at least on some level, would only inch closer to each other, particularly owing to a shift in Marcuse’s outlook. Among the ideas the two authors shared and agreed on is that of rational authority, which centers on a distinction between domination and rational uses of power. Romanetto also notes, for instance, that ideas reminiscent of Fromm’s notion of social character were interspersed throughout Marcuse’s own writings (87). Yet one issue they clearly differed has to do with the radical Left’s relationship to the Establishment. Fromm was willing to work in and through the Establishment, while Marcuse eschewed it, embracing student radicalism and the counterculture (93). Romanetto foregrounds Fromm and Marcuse’s differing attitudes toward radicalism in his discussion, emphasizing at times the shifts in Marcuse’s thinking throughout his career as a public intellectual. Scattered throughout Romanetto’s discussion here are important observations about the nature of human aggression, radicalism, hope, and humanism, phenomena that are considered mainly from a Frommian vantage point. Interestingly, Romanetto also notes that Fromm was more consistent intellectually throughout his career than was Marcuse (98). More discussion on the issue is required to ascertain whether that is a manifestation of a flaw and deficiency in Marcuse’s theorizing (and perhaps even character) or rather an expression of a non-dogmatic and non-linear intellectual trajectory. I suspect the latter is closer to the truth.

Bridging the divide between these two thinkers on some level, another one of Romanetto’s astute and important observations is that both Marcuse and Fromm placed a premium on good character, seeing it as essential to an effective radical politics (99). Yet another interesting and relevant observation concerns both thinkers’ embrace of the revolutionary promise, potential, and influence of certain “heretic” and non-conformist religious movements (100). Romanetto insists that, beyond this catalogue of self-evident affinities and differences, since the Dissent debate, the relationship between Fromm and Marcuse, though fraught, was characterized by a complexity that exceeded simple hostility and animosity. For one thing, the two intellectuals did indeed engage one another on multiple occasions following the debate. As Romanetto notes, they would have “a grudging respect for one another until 1965” (90). In any event, having noted notable convergences and divergences and discussed the nature of the relationship between the two thinkers, Romanetto goes on to skillfully and attentively explore the more essential, latent disagreements that underlay the famous Dissent debate and their implications for the two thinkers’ respective ideas and positions, political and otherwise, beyond the debate.

The discussion gains momentum as Romanetto begins to identify the underlying, persistent differences separating the two thinkers. Very astutely and provocatively, the author notes that at issue is not whether Marcuse, similarly to Fromm, embraced values that affirm a love of life, but the specific understanding of life that Marcuse was promoting and wedded to (102-103). At first, one might get the impression that their differences centered on the problem of eroticism and sensuousness as such, with Fromm being more hostile to sensuousness as a locus of transformative social activity than Marcuse, who tended to emphasize the productive and transformative potentialities embedded in the eroticisation of the body. Yet the essential difference, insists Romanetto, in fact lies in Marcuse and Fromm’s divergent conceptions of the basis for a new morality, with Marcuse stressing the transformative power of the aesthetic dimension and art, and Fromm affirming and emphasizing a kind of religious universalism as the core ingredient of radical social transformation instead. Romanetto notes that Fromm perceived a destructive sensibility in Marcuse’s attachment to art and the artistic milieu in which Marcuse’s thought was embedded, and that Fromm believed Marcuse was beholden to a notion of social change that de-emphasized the self-work of the personality and the will. Fromm saw maturity as the lynchpin of social change, in other words, while Marcuse was arguably hostile to the very notion of maturity. Related to this is Fromm’s emphasis on the nuances attending the question of transition, which required both individual and social transformation, and Marcuse’s alleged inability, given his valorization of a Great Refusal, to grasp the necessity of constructive activity on the road to social transformation. The lingering differences in their conceptions of social transformation are reflected in their respective visions of the artist. For Fromm, the artist is a “passionate disciplined artisan” (107), while Marcuse saw promise in the vision of the artist as a “daydreamer who lived out his daydreams” (107), one who prefigures the collapse of the distinction between work and play (105-107).

In taking up the explicitly political aspects of the Fromm-Marcuse dispute, Romanetto zeroes in on the problem of work and productiveness, charging that Fromm treated as misguided Marcuse’s attempt to collapse work into play, and failed to grasp the essence of Fromm’s notion of productiveness, erroneously associating it with industrial productivity (108). He goes on to note tensions in Marcuse’s political and economic attitudes to the question of centralization. Interestingly, he also notes tensions in Marcuse’s understanding of the role of the New Left in the transition to socialism, being apt during the movement’s heyday to see it as a meaningful, even leaderful, catalyst for change, but subsequently emphasizing the strategic need for and importance of practices of direct democracy and local political activity (109). Indeed, Marcuse was perhaps generally ambivalent in his politics, at once encouraging revolution, at least in the cultural sense, and insisting that the situation of the New Left was not in fact revolutionary or even pre-revolutionary (112). At times, unsurprisingly, aspects of Fromm and Marcuse’s strategic orientations converged, yet strong disagreements lingered in the background. Marcuse, insists Romanetto, was ultimately drawn to a more individualistic style of political organization, one that foregrounded the powers of the imagination and play, whereas Fromm was drawn to a politics “in which communal bonds are strengthened through the aspiration towards a common vision.” (111). From a slightly different angle, the divergence circles around the following tension: Fromm was committed to a religiously driven “vision” whereas Marcuse privileged an individualized, daydream laden politics of refusal, imagination and affect. Also at issue was the problematic of hope and its relative absence from Marcuse’s politics. Alas, Fromm was probably not amiss in noticing that Marcuse engages with the question of hope only relatively superficially, and that a deeper engagement with it is an integral part of an authentically critical theory. It would perhaps not be out of place to point out here, however, that we should not overlook the fact that Marcuse’s notion of the Great Refusal always implies a collective dimension and that it ought not to be understood in a strictly individualistic sense. At the same time, Romanetto correctly and astutely notes, though perhaps this observation could be fleshed out in more detail, that Fromm’s theory of collective action and politic benefited from his articulation of and engagement with a concept of relatedness (113).

Romanetto concludes by drawing out the implications of these respective conceptions of political organization for each thinker’s understanding of political authority. Marcuse stresses rebelliousness against authority, though still recognizing the need for some political leadership, as suggested earlier, while Fromm, of course, recognized that the act of rebelling against authority is not necessarily progressive or revolutionary. At the same time, Fromm, notes Romanetto, was at times prone to idealizing authority (113). This is a subtle point, but it seems to me that Romanetto’s excellent analysis points not only to differing political commitments, as far as Fromm was concerned, but to fundamentally antagonistic visions of radical social transformation. Fromm saw Marcuse’s thought as tending toward the valorization of an absolute, and perhaps abrupt, revolutionary break with the status quo, whereas Fromm’s own ideas coalesced around a more gradual and measured vision of radical transformation. It is clear enough from the author’s analysis that this was Fromm’s view of the differences separating Marcuse’s and his own thought. But perhaps the author could have made clearer where he himself stands on the issue, that is to say, whether he shares Fromm’s perception of Marcuse’s views and their limitations. In other words, perhaps a sharper line could have been drawn at times between Fromm’s ideas about Marcuse and the author’s own stance. Moreover, though there are hints of this in the text, perhaps the author could have made clearer whose position he ultimately deemed superior and more compelling. As suggested earlier, perhaps more attention could have been given to one of the defining elements of Marcuse’s thought during the New Left period, the Great Refusal. I agree with Romanetto’s overall assessment of how the concept fits into Marcuse’s dispute with Fromm, but fleshing out the concept would have made it easier to identify its strengths and weaknesses vis à vis Fromm’s own thought. In a similar vein, perhaps the author could have provided a brief evaluation of Fromm’s attitudes to the student radicals and the various movements associated with the New Left in general. This would have been helpful because it seems to me that Fromm’s ambivalence toward the various movements of the New Left was one of his political weaknesses, as was his unwillingness, in direct opposition to Marcuse, to provide them with direction and guidance. It should be noted here that Marcuse acted as a leader and mentor to the New Left, though not without a level of ambivalence—this, of course, is the hallmark of ethical leadership.

I would like to make it abundantly clear that I believe this chapter to be of the highest academic quality, not least because it offers a highly original and meticulously researched intervention into the academic debate around the relationship between Marcuse and Fromm. I would also like to note that this chapter offers an extremely balanced account of the divergences, political and otherwise, between Fromm and Marcuse. Though he seems to side with Fromm throughout his discussion, at least implicitly, Romanetto nevertheless does not shy away from noting that Marcuse’s assessments and positions were both more nuanced than Fromm often gave him credit for and at times even superior to those of Fromm (e.g. 112). As is the case with the rest of the book, the intervention offered in this chapter is groundbreaking. Romanetto’s book positions him as a rapidly emerging authority in Fromm scholarship and Critical Theory. The chapter discussed above, and the rest of the book, should be read by all Fromm scholars and Critical Theorists, and they ought to be read carefully and attentively.