INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION

There is a striking paradox about the appearance of a new edition of The Sane Society
today, thirty-five years after its original publication. On the one hand, the subject of the
book—the psychological vicissitudes of life in advanced capitalist societies—is highly
topical: indeed, its sombre mood is in some ways even more relevant to the climate of our
culture now than it was in 1955. On the other hand, though the concerns of the book may be
contemporary, the genre in which it is written is definitely not. It is not only the remedy
which Fromm proposes for the ills of our civilization that jars with current modes of
thought; it is the very idea of proposing a remedy in the first place. Grand generalizations
about what is wrong with our culture and how to put it right are, nowadays, more often to
be found on the shelves of alternative bookshops than in the university library. Intellectuals
today are either pragmatically occupied with making a living, or immersed in a sort of
refined hopelessness; like neurotics who have been disappointed by one failed therapy after
another, they have resigned themselves to the one counsellor who has always had time for
them—their despair. Perhaps a book like The Sane Society, precisely because of its
unfashionable intentions, can help us to jar out of this dead-end mentality.

Let us consider first of all the respects in which this book is topical. How, indeed, can a
work actually become more relevant than it was when it was written? The answer has to do
with an increased readiness to doubt the sanity of our own society. Back in the 1950s, freed
from the shadow of world war, and embarked on an unprecedented and seemingly limitless
economic growth, few in the United States doubted that things were “getting better all the
time” (as the Beatles flippantly put it a few years later). In this era of hard work and
optimism, Fromm’s radical doubts about the structure of American society can have struck
a chord among very few readers, however fascinating they may have found his discussions
of personal growth and interpersonal relationships. In this book especially, he must have
struck many people simply as a talented refugee who, after more than twenty years, was
still having a hard time settling down to the American Way of Life.

Since then, however, we have had Vietnam, the “drop-out” generation, the student
movement, global recession, alarms on the ecological front, and a revival of the faith in
“market forces” which has brought back some of the worst features of nineteenth-century
entrepreneurism. And as the twentieth century draws to a close, Western philosophers and
social scientists have become plagued with doubts about the direction our civilization is
taking and the durability of the values that have held it together until now. A symptom of
this unease is the fact that, although it is nearly half a century since Hiroshima and the
Holocaust, the nightmare images of these events seem to play more obsessively on our
consciousness now than when they had only just happened. Today, it would appear to be
much harder to forget that these atrocities were perpetrated by people like us—and that
similar inhumanities go on being perpetrated, day by day, systematically organized,
ideologically sanctioned, and on a global scale.

Of course, the spectacular collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, with the mass conversion of
one communist country after another to the ideals of democracy and consumerism, has
given many renewed hope for “our” civilization. Certainly, these events confirm Fromm’s
optimistic conviction that human bondage is an unnatural state, from which sooner or later
people will manage to break free. Unfortunately, however, what the inhabitants of the
communist world were trying to get away from is much clearer than where they wanted to
get to (that is, if we assume that it has to do with something more than just video-recorders
and Coca-Cola). Laying bare the ills of communism does not, as many suppose, constitute a
vindication of capitalism: “our” problems remain, and few have analysed them more
thoroughly at a psychological level than Erich Fromm.

But the contemporary awareness of these problems is, alarmingly enough, in inverse
proportion to the faith in our ability to find answers to them. That is why we know, after
reading a single page of The Sane Society, that it is a product of another age. For the loss of
intellectual confidence in the direction of our civilization has been accompanied by a loss
of faith in the familiar stories—Lyotard’s “grands récits”1—within which we used to
diagnose its problems and how they should be set right. This development has been
paralleled by the depoliticization of politics itself (which Fromm himself saw coming): the
tendency of political parties to abandon ideological platforms for packaging, presentation
and personalities. The party intellectuals have been put out to grass, and replaced by
marketing consultants.

The philosopher Alistair MacIntyre, in After Virtue,2 was among the first in recent times to
diagnose the moral paralysis which seems to have beset Western thought. From sociology
and anthropology we have learned that values and beliefs are a relative affair; from
philosophers of science, that scientists are never less to be trusted than when they announce
that they have established something with absolute certainty. According to MacIntyre, we
have sunk into this comfortable relativism— the philosophy of “anything goes”—as into a
treacherous quagmire, and we are already up to our necks. His message was that those who
still believed in rationality (in the difference between truth and falsity, good and evil) had
better start looking around for whatever pieces of driftwood they could find with which to
pull themselves out.

Another group of intellectuals, however, saw the dismantling of the central convictions of
Western thought not as a threat but as a welcome liberation from delusions which, since the
Enlightenment, had held not only us, but the inhabitants of the worlds we had colonized, in
their grip. Foucault3 announced “the death of Man”—the abandonment of belief in a human
essence which could function as a yardstick for social progress. The postmodern subject
had no identity, or rather, had as many identities as there were discourses in which to
participate. Like the singer in a contemporary videoclip, who is metamorphosed by
electronic editing technology from 1930s costume to hippie garb, from man to woman,
from black to white, and from black-and-white back to colour again, all in the space of one
verse, today’s individuals do not know who they are, and (if we are to believe the
postmodernists) are frankly relieved not to have to any more. Moreover, in the post-
colonial world, events such as the furore over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses have
brought home to us that there are incommensurable gulfs between Western and non-
Western beliefs and values, and no readily available means of bridging them.

The debate between postmodernists and modernists— between relativists and the believers
in absolute standards of rationality—is perhaps the central issue of contemporary social
science. Where Fromm stands is perfectly clear: he is a modernist, an heir—albeit a critical
one—to the Enlightenment, and a humanist who believes that a diagnosis of human ills can
be grounded in an objective conception of what man essentially is. In this respect Fromm
remains a loyal adherent of the Frankfurt School, although he parted company with it long
before writing this book. The leading exponent of this school of social theory today, Jürgen
Habermas, is the main defender of modernism against the attacks of the post-modernists.4
For Habermas, as for Fromm, man is by no means dead: he has simply not yet reached
adulthood. Whereas Habermas roots his conception of the “rational society” in axioms of
communication theory (democracy being a necessary condition of full rationality), Fromm
chooses to anchor his argument in a sort of psychoanalytic anthropology. The content is
different, but the project is basically the same.