The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm by K. Durkin New York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2014,  250 pp.

In “How to Become a Forgotten Intellectual,” McLaughlin (1998) cites the case of Erich Fromm and argues that “Fromm's very public challenge to both Marxist and psychoanalytic orthodoxies created powerful enemies who were hostile to him because of the deep-seated loyalties and identifications that are created within intellectual movements” (p. 240). As a result, “throughout the 1970s and 1980s the view of Fromm as a simplistic popularizer was institutionalized as a cliché among American intellectuals” (p. 237). Happily, the recent appearance of a new biography by Friedman (2013) and books such as those by Wilde (2004), Braune (2014), and Durkin , among others, suggest a long overdue Fromm revival may be underway that will hopefully expose and rectify the caricature and denigration of the work of this important thinker.

Fromm has been widely viewed as a “neo-Freudian” member of the “culturistic” school of psychoanalysis who, along with Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, and others, in rejecting the “biologism” of the classical Freudian theory of the instincts, succumbed to a radically constructivist and culturally relativist “sociologism” that Dennis H. Wrong (1961) called “the over-socialized conception of man in modern sociology.” While agreeing