|
|
Escape from Freedom- An Academic Review Over the course of history, man’s desire for complete freedom has been overcome by the responsibilities and dangers involved with liberty. Freedom can represent different things to people, this can entail civil, political and ethic liberty’s. The more freedom we poses, the bigger the burden and the more we are responsible for. This causes some of us to desire less freedom in favour of support for those who will decide for us, freedom then becomes a negative situation from which we try to escape. Erich Fromm’s book Escape from Freedom explains how freedom comes at a price. He believes “That modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self, that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless.”(forward x) Fromm believes we feel lonely and isolated due to our separation from nature and each other. We are the only species of animal to feel this isolation, he thereby refers to it as the human condition. Fromm takes a social-psychological approach by combining the theories of Freud and Marx. Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis focussed on the individual self, while Marx’s views pertained to society as a whole. Fromm breaks his structure of thinking into three groups His purpose in studying and writing about this subject is because he believes this to be the main crisis of our time. The initial version of this book was first written during the reign of the Nazi party over Germany. Fromm’s goal was to develop a clear understanding of how such an evil organization could become so powerful. The fact that Nazi party gained control of a democratic nation shows that this could happen even in todays free world. Hitler’s rise to power was a combination of economic, political and psychological issues facing Germans at that time. The Nazi party appealed to the lack of patriotism facing the country, after the loss of the first world war.
|
