THE YOUNG ERICH FROMM'S CONTRIBUTION TO CRIMINOLOGY*
KEVIN ANDERSON
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Northern Illinois University
Erich Fromm's virtually unknown early writings on crime were published in German in psychoanalytic journals in the early 1930s, but have never been translated into English. In three articles published in 1930 and 1931, Fromm considered the criminal justice system as an important legitimating institution within the capitalist social order. His theoretical contribution to criminology is discussed here as a largely unknown but important chapter in the history of criminology, one which can still speak to us today. I also assess his contribution from several vantage points: (1) its relationship to earlier German liberal criminological reformers such as Liszt and Aschaffenburg; (2) its connection to the Frankfurt School's synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis, which underlay their account of the leanings of large sectors of the German population toward authoritarianism; (3) the difference in focus between Fromm's work and that of other psychoanalytic criminologists of the period, such as Alexander and Staub; and (4) comparisons with other leading European radical theorists who subsequently wrote on crime: the Frankfurt School's Rusche and Kirchheimer, the French psychoanalyst Lacan, and the French post-structuralist Foucault. I conclude that Fromm's work contains important insights for contemporary criminology.
The young Erich Fromm's Freudian Marxist critiques of the criminal justice system seem to have disappeared into oblivion. Published in German in leading psychoanalytic journals in 1930 and 1931, Fromm's three scholarly articles on crime constitute an important and original discussion of how the fear of crime and the role of the state in repressing crime support and legitimate the existing capitalist social order. Except for a brief book review published in 1935, Fromm apparently never returned to these issues after 1931. Nor did he include any of his articles on criminal justice
* Research for this paper was supported by grants from the German Academic Exchange Service and the Northern Illinois University Graduate School. I would like to thank Rainer Funk of the Erich Fromm Archives in Tfibingeu, Germany for his help with source materials. I received helpful comments on earlier drafts from Janet Afary, Piers Beirne, Bonnie Berry, George Uri Fischer, Charles Herr, Douglas Ketlner, Joel Kovel, Lauren Langman, Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, and Heinz Osterle, as well as research assistance from Marc Rittle and Michelle Sierzega. Earlier versions of some parts of this paper were presented at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology, held in Miami in 1994 and in Boston in 1995, and of the American Sociological Association in Toronto in 1997. JUSTICE QUARTERLY, Vol. 15 No. 4, December 1998 © 1998 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences