Escape from Authority. The Perspectives of Erich Fromm: By John H. Schaar. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1961. 324 pp.

It is not difficult to share ideals with Erich Fromm, humanist, idealist, and powerful social critic. At least John H. Schaar, political scientist, believes so. He admires Fromm for his critical scrutiny of society and willingness to define what he considers to be the good, the moral man in a sane and good society. But to share ideals is not synonymous with sharing ideas; and in this particular instance Schaar's penetrating analysis of Fromm's ideas finds them inconsistent, contradictory, and lacking in logic though they are, at first blush, attractive, dazzling, and even plausible. Schaar dissects Fromm's Utopia, probes the depths of its logical and philosophical position to unveil its origins and its consequences. The Utopian society conceived by Fromm is humanitarian, naturalistic, and mystical. He cures society and abolishes man in the social system he visualizes for mankind.

Fromm believes that ethical standards, value judgments, the norms of conduct can and must be derived from man himself, not from authority; that ethics is inherent in the living; that he has found objective norms based on the nature of life itself. It is an important consideration that he believes that his insights about the human condition stem from his knowledge and experience as a psychoanalyst, that his grasp of man's basic needs is derived from empirical data which permit him to know what is good for man and what is evil. Schaar's analysis demonstrates otherwise: Fromm's insights are normative and philosophical in their derivation rather than empirical. In the first few pages of his prologue Schaar makes