Hello, you're very welcome to Longreans, a Jacqueline podcast where we look in depth of political topics and thinkers.

My name's Daniel Finn, on the features editor here at Jacobin, and I'll be presenting the show. The German writer Eric Fromm was one of the most

important social philosophers of the last century. In books like Escape from Freedom and the

Sain Society, Fromm tried to explain the rise of fascism by drawing on the work of Carl Marx and Sigmund Freud.

Himself in exile from the Nazis, Fromm settled permanently in the US, but remained a strong critic of American

capitalism and the nuclear arms race. A best-selling author in his own time, who appeared on

national television, Fromm may not be as well remembered today as

former colleagues like Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno.

But his ideas are still an important tool in the fight against authoritarian nationalism.

Our guest today is Kiran Duran Deacon, Kiran teaches at the University of York, and he's the author of The Radical Humanism of Eric Fromm.

I began by asking him about Fromm's experience as a young man

when his native Germany went through a decade of war, revolution and economic crisis from

1914 onwards.

I think that living through these events that completely transfigured Germany in the

early 1900s, this had an absolutely profound effect on from he spoke

some years later in his 60s actually of the great war as the event more than anything else that determined his

intellectual development and of how struck he was by the nakedness of the hate and irrationality as it manifested in German nationalist feeling towards the British at the time,

you know how the British had suddenly become evil and unscrupulous and

intent on destroying the innocent and all-too-trusting German heroes as he put it.

So I think the whole experience of the war with its mass irrationality, not to mention of course it's, you know, what you say is its unheralded kind of

level destructiveness was an absolutely central influence on from and what ultimately pushed

in the direction of the study of psychology and of Freud and of psychoanalysis.

...