Social Character: Erich Fromm and the Ideological Glue of Neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

Several thinkers have expressed the view that the central nostrums of neoliberalism, including self-reliance, personal responsibility and individual risk, have become part of the “common sense” fabric of everyday life. My paper argues that Erich Fromm’s idea of social character offers a comprehensive and persuasive answer to this question. While some have sought the answer to this conundrum in Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I argue that, by itself, this answer is not sufficient. What is significant about the notion of social character, I claim, is that it manages to unify “top-down” approaches like governmentality focused on ideas and policy, with “bottom-up” approaches focused on how the insights of day to day experience are mediated through culture. Adapting this theory to neoliberalism, I argue, means that the “common sense” nature of neoliberalism, and the lack of a reckoning for its massive economic failure (as evidenced by the 2007 Great Recession), are explicable through the formation of a neoliberal social character, by means of which experiential processes align with cultural meanings and, subsequently, fuse with social expectations.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• Erich Fromm
• social character
• governmentality
• ideology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Roger Foster is Professor of philosophy at Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York. He is the author of Adorno: The Recovery of Experience (SUNY Press, 2007), and Adorno and Philosophical Modernism: The Inside of Things (Lexington, 2016). Roger Foster has also published numerous articles on the tradition of critical social theory.

Notes

1. Peck et al., “Neoliberalism Resurgent?” 265.

2. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 41; Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis go to Waste.

3. Barnett et al., “The Elusive Subjects of Neo-Liberalism,” 625.

4. Ibid., 628.

5. Binkley, “Psychological Life as Enterprise,” 85.

6. Hoggett and Thompson, “Introduction,” 1.

7. Konings, The Emotional Logic of Capitalism.

8. Ibid., 101.

9. Ibid., 105.

10. Fromm, Escape From Freedom, 27.

11. See Funk, Erich Fromm, 21.

12. Fromm, “The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology,” 127.

13. Fromm, “Analytic Social Psychology,” 128.

14. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 308.

15. Fromm, The Sane Society, 77.

16. Ibid., 72.

17. Sidanius and Pratto, Social Dominance.

18. Smulewicz-Zucker, “The Relevance of Fromm’s Concept of the Distorted Personality,” 175.

19. See, for example, Jost et al., “Ideology.”

20. See Mitchell, Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis, 33.

21. Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, 42.

22. Funk, “Erich Fromm and the Intersubjective Tradition,” 7.

23. This is why Fromm says that psychoanalytic social psychology “has a valid place within historical materialism”, “Analytic Social Psychology,” 128.

24. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action; Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition.

25. See Thompson, “Normative Humanism as Redemptive Critique,” 47.

26. Funk, “Erich Fromm and the Intersubjective Tradition,” 6.

27. Fromm, Man for Himself, 86.

28. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 311.

29. Ibid., 317.

30. Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 64.

31. Fromm, The Sane Society, 23.

32. Ibid., 24.

33. Fromm, Man for Himself, 32.

34. Fromm, The Sane Society, 102.

35. Ibid., 312–14.

36. Fromm, Man for Himself, 78.

37. Fromm’s most thorough treatment of social character in the context of social change can be found in the anthropological study of social character in a small Mexican village south of Mexico City, a study which Fromm initiated and also supervised from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. The theoretical analysis can be found in Fromm and Maccoby, Social Character in a Mexican Village.

38. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism.

39. Ibid., 200.

40. Ibid., 326.

41. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 307.

42. Tyler May, Homeward Bound.

43. Powerful contemporary critiques of the cultural consequences of the predominance of security in the postwar era can be found in Whyte, The Organization Man and Marcuse, One Dimensional Man.

44. Zaretsky, “Psychoanalysis and the Spirit of Capitalism,” 372.

45. Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence, 277.

46. Ibid., 293.

47. Binkley, Happiness as Enterprise, 162.

48. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 325.

49. Konings, The Emotional Logic of Capitalism, 91.

50. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 225.

51. Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” 203.

52. Martila, The Culture of Enterprise in Neoliberalism, 5.

53. Rose and Miller, “Political Power Beyond the State,” 298.

54. Power, Organized Uncertainty, 22.

55. Ibid., 40–1.

56. Rose and Miller, “Political Power beyond the State,” 272.

57. See Binkley, Happiness as Enterprise, 51.

58. Ibid., 163.

59. I borrow the phrase ‘wounded attachment’ from Brown, States of Injury, although I am using the term to capture a psychoanalytic process identified by Fromm, whereas Brown is talking about the dynamic of identity politics.

60. Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 90, 92.

61. See Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 81–122.

62. Ibid., 122.

63. I discuss this point more fully in my paper “The Therapeutic Spirit of Neoliberalism.” Political Theory 44, no.1 (February 2016): 82–105.

64. Dartington, “The Therapeutic Fantasy,” 188.

65. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart.

66. Binkley, Happiness as Enterprise, 135.

67. See Ibid., 35. A powerful recent discussion of the effects of insecurity on social relationships and the painful effects of the attempt to avoid dependence can be found in Pugh, The Tumbleweed Society.

68. Rimke, “Governing Citizens through Self-Help Literature,” 68.

69. Brown, “Learning to Live Again.”

70. Ibid., 363.

71. Binkley, “Psychological Life as Enterprise,” 96.

72. Layton, “What Divides the Subject?” 66.

73. Ibid., 69.

74. Pelz, “The Manic Society,” 68.

75. Layton, “Irrational exuberance.”

76. Silva, Coming Up Short 109.

77. Ibid., 83.

78. Ibid., 84.

79. Layton, “Some Psychic Effects of Neoliberalism,” 165.

80. I am grateful to the reviewer of Critical Horizons for prompting me to think more clearly about the substance of Fromm’s contribution to this debate.