A Frommian perspective on the socio-psychological structure of post-fascism in liberal democracies

ABSTRACT

My research explores Erich Fromm’s social theories of narcissism, alienation and authoritarianism for the purpose of linking those theories together, thereby analysing current populist phenomena as an extension of a fascist development in terms of Enzo Traverso’s conception of post-fascism. In my view, Fromm’s critical social theory of narcissism, which pertains to his two other theories, has great potential to unravel current political issues in liberal democracies that are generally tackled in terms of populism. Through a demonstration of the theoretical scope of Fromm’s social theory, which sheds light on pathological social and political phenomena in historical continuity, I argue that the primary tasks of Critical Theory in Frommian terms are to divulge the sources of fascist orientations in seemingly democratic practice and to offer appropriate remedies for these difficulties. In this light, I conclude that in terms of a Frommian social theory of narcissism, fascist types of politics thrive even in advanced liberal-democratic countries, taking the form of authoritarian populism, particularly where society rests on a narcissistic character structure intertwined with an authoritarian orientation.

KEYWORDS:

• Alienation
• authoritarianism
• Critical Theory
• fascism
• narcissism
• populism
• post-fascism

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jeremy Kleidosty at the University of Helsinki for reading and commenting on my manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Takamichi Sakurai is a Senior Researcher at Keio University SFC, Japan and a Lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. He holds a PhD from Heidelberg University, Germany, where he also worked as a visiting scholar. His research focus is on comparative social and political theory in psychoanalytic terms. He is the author of Political Theories of Narcissism: Towards Self-Reflection on Knowledge and Politics from the Psychoanalytic Perspectives of Erich Fromm and Fujita Shōzō (Zurich: LIT Verlag, 2018). In addition, he has published research articles in Global Intellectual History, Japanese Journal of Political Science and Fromm Forum.

Notes

1 On this, Morelock’s work (2018) and Kellner’s work (2016) tackle the issues of ‘authoritarian populism’ from this perspective, focusing particularly on those in the US. However, the frameworks of the books are not involved specifically in analysing the issues in terms of fascism.

2 In addition, it is worthwhile to develop Fromm’s social theory of narcissism, particularly in the sense that exactly in the context of fascism Traverso himself refers to Fromm in his recent work on post-fascism and populism, The New Faces of Fascism (2019, 24).

3 This fact can be considered in the same line as disregard for a scholarly figure of Fromm as a Critical Theorist as seen above.

4 In this respect, from a Frommian perspective the current academic trend of interdisciplinary attempts does rather appear to be a counterpart phenomenon of the subdivision of disciplines.

5 On this, it must be noted that in Frommian terms the economic sense of narcissism is that in a market one seeks to act in order to sell oneself at the highest possible price, and that its political sense is that in a political society one helps others and vice versa (politics of self-love) or depends upon others and vice versa (politics of narcissism). This is, as noted above, based essentially on Fromm’s dialectical view of narcissism and self-love.

6 With regard to the description ‘bundle individual together’, it is interesting to note that the concept of fascism is derived from the Italian word ‘fascio’, meaning ‘bundle of rods’, which is used for the delineation of group solidarity (Whittam 1995, 6).

7 This book is of great relevance in many respects, particularly in the sense that it carries out some clinical case studies of Hitler and some political elites such as Joseph Stalin and Heinrich Himmler. The book can be useful in identifying not only the essence of authoritarian characteristics but also some of its additional character features.

8 However, it should be noted that he had already introduced the concept and succeeded in this work to a certain extent in The Heart of Man (1964).

9 It is particularly interesting to note that Fromm defines Hitler as a ‘withdrawn, extremely narcissistic, unrelated, undisciplined, sadomasochistic, and necrophilous person’ (1973, 413).

10 With regard to the second point, some works can be referred to (Griffin 2007; Woodley 2010).

11 My brief survey shows that there hardly existed any parallel usage of the two political concepts before the 1970s.

12 It can be argued that the term post-fascism was introduced by the Rumanian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás (2000, 2001).