The book that first attempted to explain the rise of totalitarianism in the heart of civilized Western Europe and the book that first implored American intellectuals to begin fretting over the situation in their own country was Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941). A practicing psychoanalyst and former member of the Institute for Social Research, Fromm emigrated from Germany in 1933 and established himself as a penetrating critic of the socioeconomic conditions that had produced fascism. Blending psychoanalysis and empirical studies, Fromm linked recent historical changes in capitalism to the widespread psychological malaise affecting the millions of Europeans who were willing to sacrifice themselves to the authoritarian state. The breadth of his historical perspective accounted for the appeal of his book as did his trenchant depiction of the loneliness of the modern individual, who, according to Fromm, had begun, in a tragic reversal of history, to bemoan the litany of freedoms provided by Western civilization. Borrowing themes from Max Weber and Karl Marx, Fromm sketched the historical emergence of the modern individual: the development of the capitalist market system had freed the individual from bondage and servitude; the rise of Protestantism had challenged the authority of the church; and the French and American revolutions in the eighteenth century had ushered in civil and political liberties. Freed from the “primary ties” of family, church, and caste found in medieval society, the individual had emerged upon the world’s stage, “independent, self-reliant, and critical,” liberated from the “old enemies of freedom” in the name of self-discovery.4 But this sense of freedom, cautioned Fromm, was illusionary and ignored the “new enemies of a different nature.”5 In fact, the individual now needed to confront the “inner restraints, compulsions, and fears” that arose with the collapse of “outer restraints.” Free to determine his way within the democratic state, the individual had been deprived of any markers for a positive sense of freedom, leaving him “more isolated, alone, and afraid” (104). Overwhelmed by the bureaucratic indifference of modern organizations, the modern individual came to consider the demands of freedom too burdensome. Unable to withstand the feelings of “isolation and powerlessness,” the individual tried to “escape from freedom” (133). Under such conditions, the modern individual, according to Fromm, had developed sadomasochistic impulses. This “burden of freedom” was overcome by forgoing “the independence of one’s own individual self” and masochistically fusing “with somebody or something” (140) in order to acquire the strength the individual lacked. These “masochistic strivings” were satisfied by subordination to a “bigger and more powerful whole” whether in the form of “a person, an institution, God, the nation, conscience, or a psychic compulsion” (154). According to Fromm, this new “authoritarian character” took pleasure in submission to state authority and joy in the willful destruction of others as scapegoats for the individual’s own powerless condition.
Fromm’s book had an immediate impact. Most, if not all, discussions of totalitarianism in the United States were filtered through his analytic lens. Fromm’s discussion of the sadomasochistic structure of the modern personality was appropriated, for instance, into psychologist Abraham Maslow’s oft-cited 1943 Journal of Social Psychology article “The Authoritarian Character Structure,” which was the culmination of his five-year study of authoritarian beliefs in America. Social scientists, such as Harold Lasswell, Hadley Cantril, and William Kornhauser, all of whom conducted extended investigations into political pathologies, borrowed from Fromm’s speculative framework. The book, however, that most readily translated Fromm’s analytic framework into an American vernacular was Arthur Schlesinger’s 1949 book The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. He argued, with a certain Eliotic inflection, that modern America, with “its quota of lonely and frustrated people, craving social, intellectual and even sexual fulfillment they cannot obtain in existing society,” had become a breeding ground for individuals who “want to be disciplined.”6 According to Schlesinger, the impersonality of American society had forced the individual to find “outlets for the impulses of sadism and masochism” (54). For most of these critics, three factors in particular seemed to be producing the sadomasochistic character that Fromm had analyzed. The first was the economic turmoil of the Great Depression. The effect of the unemployment crisis of the previous decades was a tremendous amount of uncertainty and confusion, effects that seemed to linger into the 1950s when the surprising postwar abundance should have mitigated such anxieties. For example, contributors to Daniel Bell’s The New American Right (1955) noted that the hysteria surrounding the threat of Communist subversion in the United States, which had produced the demagoguery of Joseph McCarthy, was linked to a perpetual “status anxiety” on the part of a rising lower middle class fretting that international events might disrupt its recent socioeconomic gains.
The second factor supposedly producing this sadomasochistic personality was the gradual disappearance of early industrial society of the late nineteenth century. The apparent completion of the industrial revolution through advanced automation and computer-based technology had prompted the transition in the 1950s from a goods-producing to a service-centered economy, as labor was slowly removed from the production process and transferred to clerical, technical, professional, and managerial positions. In 1962, sociologist Daniel Bell detailed this transition in a talk titled “The Post-Industrial Society,” which he gave at the Columbia University Seminar on Technology and Social Change. Arguing that the major institutions of American society were now “a vast new array of conglomerations of universities, research institutes, [and] research corporations,” Bell presented a vision of social life turned upside down, as the “exponential growth” of scientific research had made it “more and more difficult” on the “cultural level of society” to develop “terms for expressing what is occurring in the realm of science and in life itself.”7 The public imagination was stirred by this shift, as the American worker symbolically transformed from the brawny, muscular industrial laborer from the turn of the century into the weak, conformist white-collar worker of the 1950s. The representations of “manly work,” as Barbara Melosh has shown, that dominated the state-sponsored art of the New Deal in the 1930s were erased by caricatures such as those found in sociologist William Whyte’s 1956 work The Organization Man of the “unmanly arts of persuasion” of professional life.8 No longer engaging in the harsh physical demands of productive labor, the middle-class male of the new corporate order bore little relation to his ancestors. According to Whyte, the replacement of the nineteenth-century Protestant ethic of “individual initiative and imagination” by the social ethic of cooperative group dynamics within the corporate world had made “morally legitimate the pressures of society against the individual.”9
This transition from a goods-producing to a service-centered economy had, according to most critics, produced an intolerable cultural asphyxiation, the third factor producing an authoritarian character. In this sense, the modernist defense of high culture was not merely a reaction to the unsettling prominence of scientific language in everyday life; it was also a challenge to the degradation of intellectual life by the culture industry. In a series of highly influential essays including Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Dwight Macdonald’s “A Theory of Popular Culture,” and Theodor Adorno’s “On Popular Music” and “How to Look at Television,” high modernists noted the psychologically damaging effects of the standardization of consumer goods on American society. The steady flow of cheap cultural goods not only competed with the artifacts of high culture for audience attention but also had led to the degradation of the intellectual faculties of most consumers. Inundated with standardized slogans, the modern individual had fallen prey to a culture industry that had produced a form of psychological dependency in the consumer who masochistically subjected himself to its pleasures