You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Erich Fromm ‘was a complex man of varied visions, temperaments and “lives”’, writes Lawrence J. Friedman in The Lives of Erich Fromm. Love's Prophet (p. xxx). Because of this complexity it is rather difficult to describe and understand the essential components of Fromm's personal and intellectual career, to find the unity and continuity of his thinking and the personality behind his varied ‘lives’. Both these new works draw on extensive research and contain rich material for the history of psychoanalysis, although their scope is much larger. While Friedman's book is basically intellectual history and historical biography,1 Kieran Durkin's The Radical Humanism of Erich Fromm is a thoroughly philosophical work, though with an impressive intellectual historical frame. He focuses on Fromm's ‘radical humanism’ as an essentialist philosophy, and a challenge to the anti-humanism of postmodern, constructionist and relativistic philosophy.
Despite basic differences in their approaches, these two works have several common features. First of all, both authors would agree that taking into account his ideas and contributions to almost all branches of the human and social sciences, as well as his impact as a productive writer, political activist, public figure, and global educator, Fromm was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, a true heir of Renaissance and Enlightenment traditions. Therefore, the main intention of both authors is to bring Fromm back from oblivion, from the ‘lack of