Synopses & Reviews
Despite experiencing a limited resurgence of late, the thought of Erich Fromm is still greatly underappreciated and underutilized in the academy today. In this book, Durkin makes the case for the radical humanist social theory which emanates from Fromm's writings, showing his policy of refined continuation in relation to classical humanist thought (particularly as he saw it as manifested in Judaism, Marxism, and Freudianism) to be potentially greatly instructive in relation to the task of recovering the central categories of humanist thought that have been put out of use over the last fifty years or so. In so doing, Durkin mounts a spirited defense of Fromm against his Frankfurt School colleagues and those working within the influential anti-humanist paradigm that would seek to oppose him. Ultimately, Fromm's thinking, which consists of combinations of essentialist and constructionist aspects, and which is all-too-often taken as being superficial, is shown to be capable of positioning social theory in such a way that concerns over ethnocentrism and naiveté can be met at the same time as returning to the historical social theoretical goal of facilitating change in the world at large.
Synopsis
This book argues that Fromm is a vital and largely overlooked contribution to twentieth-century intellectual history, and one who offers a refreshingly reconfigured form of humanism that is capable of reintegrating explicitly humanist analytical categories and schemas back into social theoretical (and scientific) considerations.
Synopsis
This book, shortlisted for the British Sociological Association's Philip Abrams Memorial Prize (2015), argues that Fromm is a vital and largely overlooked contribution to twentieth-century intellectual history, and one who offers a refreshingly reconfigured form of humanism that is capable of reintegrating explicitly humanist analytical categories and schemas back into social theoretical (and scientific) considerations.
Synopsis
Kevin Durkin brings Erich Fromm's fertile but underutilized thought back into the mainstream of social theoretical thought, while challenging the sufficiency of that very thought itself. Fromm is a vital and largely overlooked contribution to twentieth-century intellectual history, and one who offers a refreshingly reconfigured form of humanism that is capable of reintegrating explicitly humanist analytical categories and schemas back into social theoretical and scientific considerations. Fromm's qualified essentialism and ethical normativism are sensible, viable, and desirable, and these aspects, coupled with his psychoanalytic social psychology provide the basis for the development of practical strategies to realize humanism in the world. Through a forensic analysis of the Judaic roots of Fromm's thinking and their secular extension via the thought of Marx and Freud, as well as his theoretical divergences from his Frankfurt School ex-colleagues, Durkin shows a serious return to Fromm will encourage renewed theorizing of, and empirical engagement with, the connections between the psychological and the social, the essential and the constructed, and the is and the ought.
About the Author
Kieran Durkin is a Lecturing Fellow at the University of Glasgow, UK.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. The Life and Writings of a Radical Humanist
2. The Roots of Radical Humanism
3. Radical Humanist Psychoanalysis
4. Psychoanalytic Social Psychology
5. Anti-Humanism: A Radical Humanist Defense
6. The Renaissance of Humanism
Conclusion