Read Online The Twilight of the American Enlightenment by George Marsden - Free Book Online

then that seldom draw comment today? What was taken for granted that might not be taken for granted today? Which of the characteristic ideals of that era are still very much alive and shaping contemporary culture?
    The best-known work relating the rise of totalitarianism to wider issues of personal freedom in society was Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom , first published in 1941 and still widely read in the 1950s (it went through three printings in 1959 and 1960 alone). Fromm was one of those remarkable Jewish émigrés who had become influential in almost every area of American thought and the arts. (One list includes forty-three such figures, from Albert Einstein in science to the composer Arnold Schoenberg.) As in the case of Hannah Arendt, the fact that he was a refugee from Hitler’s Europe made his analysis of the rise of totalitarianism all the more compelling. Fromm was not a systematic historical thinker like Arendt, explaining totalitarianism in terms of multiple levels of causation. He was, rather, an engaging synthesizer, who sketched the big picture in broad and often speculative strokes and who offered engaging insights to which general audiences could easily relate. 2
    The problem, said Fromm, was with freedom itself, that most celebrated achievement of modernity. “Modern man,”Fromm explained, had been freed from both the restraints and the securities of pre-individualistic societies, “but has not gained freedom in the positive sense of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities.” Even though freedom “brought him independence and rationality,” it also “made him isolated and thereby anxious and powerless.” Rather than advancing to the realization of the true freedom “based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man,” he had retreated into “new dependencies.” Voluntary submission to totalitarianism was the most dramatic symptom of this regress. But Americans could also see it much closer to home in the conformity of modern society, in which “the individual ceases to be himself” and “adopts entirely the kind of personality offered by the cultural patterns,” so that “he becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be.” 3
    Fromm was a master of the grand generalization in describing the evolution of modern culture and of modern man. Trained in sociology, he fashioned his historical interpretations with an air of scientific authority. The two great forces shaping the historical evolution of the collective attitudes of societies, he believed, were the economic and psychological factors. Fromm was most interested in the psychological ones. In the early modern era, Westerners believed that humans were essentially rational and driven by self-interest. Sigmund Freud exploded that view by showing that humans were most often driven by irrational and unconscious forces. Fromm saw himself as a follower of Freud, but he was also critical of the father of psychoanalysis, believing Freud was too rooted in his own time and place and not aware enough of how historicaldevelopments transformed societies and their collective psyches. Fromm nonetheless borrowed psychoanalytic categories for his explanations of historical developments. For instance, he attributed the rise of Hitler to the appeal of sadomasochism. Sadism was related to the inbuilt human will to power, and masochism reflected the tendency “ to get rid of the individual self, to lose oneself ” or “ to get rid of the burden of freedom .” Or, in order to make clear he was not talking about just neurotics, regarding normal people this tendency could be described as simply the “ authoritarian character ” who “admires authority and tends to submit to it, but at the same time he wants to be an authority himself and have others submit to him.” 4
    Fromm turned his analysis most directly on affluent America in