Erich Fromm lived many lives. Although most of them were seamlessly integrated into a long and prolific career, some remained, as Lawrence J. Friedman shows in this impressive piece of intellectual biography, mutually exclusive. A renegade Freudian analyst, a Marxian social scientist, a social-democratic public intellectual, an occasional political adviser, and ultimately a mystically inclined prophet of secular humanism and antimilitarism, Fromm left a lasting impression on American – as well as global – intellectual and cultural history. But success in each one of these realms did not always translate into success in the others.

Friedman's thorough research into Fromm's many lives suggests that his subject's remarkable achievements as a public intellectual came at a price. Fromm is generally remembered as the author of such passionately read tracts as The Art of Loving (1956) and To Have or to Be? (1976), books which straddle the boundaries separating scholarly, spiritual, and self-help literatures. Judged on the basis of their sales statistics – data Friedman compulsively recounts throughout his study – Fromm's insights appear easy to digest and hard not to adopt. When viewed from the perspective of the seminar room, however, they seem – as Friedman repeatedly laments – “self-referential” (120, 198, 251); rather devoid of “logic or evidence” (155); and, most of all, written too “quickly” and too “polemically,” “without taking astute critics very seriously” (257). Fromm became a “bestselling author” (155), in other words, by avoiding critical debate and by “recycling his ideas” (120). He emerged as a public intellectual by becoming, first and foremost, a Frommian (226).

One of the many virtues of Friedman's biography is its detailed excavation of Fromm's previous lives, prior to his intellectual descent into self-referential public prophecy. For Friedman, all roads lead to, and from, Fromm's most significant work, Escape from Freedom (1941). Written and published amidst the world-historical struggle against totalitarianism, its social-psychological analysis of what Fromm's former Frankfurt school colleagues called “the authoritarian personality” struck a chord.Footnote ¹ Fromm's breakthrough in Escape from Freedom came with his analysis of the “social character” of authoritarianism, a concept he elaborated on in the book's appendix.Footnote ² Unlike Freud, whose theory of libidinal drives suggested an individualistic and biological understanding of character formation, Fromm stressed “the interrelation of socioeconomic, psychological, and ideological factors” that came to shape both social groups and individual personalities.Footnote ³ The notion of “social character” synthesized Fromm's early passion for both Freud and Marx, and it went on to influence important mid-century writings such as David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), but as an explanatory device it remained just as fuzzy as Freud's theory of the drives. Indeed, it could – and did, over the course of Fromm's career – lead to lazy generalizations and facile dichotomies: between the authentic and the inauthentic; between the spontaneous and the submissive; between the autonomous and the authoritarian; and, last but not least, between what Fromm called the biophiliac and necrophiliac tendencies of contemporary civilization (253–54).

For Friedman, the concept of “social character” is the master key that unlocks almost all of Fromm's thought. So much so, in fact, that The Lives of Erich Fromm not only explores the origins and permutations of this concept, but also adopts it as an interpretive tool. Friedman's biography is itself Frommian, especially insofar as it seeks to situate its subject's work in contexts wider than that of individual biography alone. The chapter that Friedman devotes to the genesis of Escape from Freedom, for example, catalogues the many individuals, groups, and movements who informed Fromm's thinking throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. These included his family both in and outside Fascist Europe; the Culture and Personality Group in New York City, which brought neo-Freudians together with anthropologists such as Margaret Mead; unorthodox theorists and clinicians such as Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan; and Katherine Dunham, an African American dance pioneer with whom Fromm had an intense and formative affair. In a similar vein, Friedman interprets Fromm's quick and largely successful Americanization during this period, which stood in contrast to the experiences of fellow émigrés and Frankfurt school colleagues such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, more as a process of social adaptation than of personal transformation.

Fromm's life seems to demonstrate that social character works at the back of private experience. He was a German Jewish social theorist who came of age, intellectually speaking, in turbulent, interwar Frankfurt. It was there, alongside and with the help of figures such as Leo Löwenthal, Franz Rosenzweig, Alfred Weber, Salman Rabinkow, and Max Horkheimer, that Fromm found the Talmud, Marx, and Freud, in more or less that order. It was also there that he stumbled upon Johann Jakob Bachofen, embraced social-democratic humanism, and found himself an analyst – who became, (in)conveniently enough, the first of his three wives (in addition to many other lovers, such as Dunham, in between).

Friedman makes a strong case for rescuing the early, Frankfurt school-era Fromm. In order to do so, he has to criticize, even debunk, the later, more popular and influential Fromm, the Fromm whom Herbert Marcuse once savaged in the pages of Dissent for misreading, and subsequently deradicalizing, Freud. Indeed, Fromm's strengths as a public intellectual became, in time, some of his most noticeable weaknesses, especially in the eyes of his more scholarly peers. Like Friedman, many today look askance at Fromm's “prophetic exhortations” (276). But this only seems to raise the question: what do we want in a public intellectual – and why do we want it? Maybe a look into our own social character, if such a thing exists, will tell us.