Social Character, Social Change and the Social Future

• In Event: 4232 - Critical Theory I: Dialectical Engagements

Abstract

One of the most important contributions Erich Fromm made to the Frankfurt school tradition of Critical Theory was the notion of “social character” that wove together Marx’s critique of alienation, capitalism, and historical materialism, along with Freud’s psychodynamics and Weber’s concerns with affective and value oriented actions typical of religion in general that informed his specific concerns with ascetic Protestantism. For Fromm, these antecedents led to a dynamic conception of character based on socially shaped needs, desires, and types of human relationships (for example love, hate and sadomasochism) acquisition (receiving, taking away, saving, gathering, producing). Social character was shaped by materially based dominant cultural norms and motivated by socially based needs rather than the biological drives in Freudian theory. For Fromm, social character referred to the most frequent pattern typical in a particular society at a particular moment in its history. This did not necessarily mean that it was characteristic of the vast majority of the society, but a significant number of people who embodied the social character were generally “best adapted” to the political economy and thus more likely to assume the positions of economic, political, social and cultural leadership of a particular society. “Adaptation” to an existing society was not necessarily “beneficial” and more often than not, societies based on hierarchical domination fostered various types of nonproductive social characters whose “pathological normality” thwarted their capacity to love and find creative self-fulfillment because hierarchical systems require that substantial numbers of people serve the interests of authority with little or no benefit to themselves, and often to their own detriment.As is increasing evident today there is a major change in social character and more and more youth move to left and while this has fostered right wing reaction, we envision a sane society of productive characters

Authors

• Lauren Langman, Loyola University of Chicago

• George Lundskow, Grand Valley State University