Fromm Frankfurt With Love (Part 1)
Let’s be cheeky and try to understand something about the Austrian School using the ideas of the Frankfurt School. The two are, in any case, now permanently locked-together in a Reichenbachian struggle. At least, the bastard ideological descendants of the Austrian School seem to imagine this. For some reason. So fuck it, let’s ignore the fact that this is actually a delusional notion (at least as it is generally meant), and see what happens when they actually fight.
In his 1941 book Fear of Freedom, the Marxist-Freudian Erich Fromm elaborates a dialectical account of human consciousness in late modernity through the prism of a dichotomous conception of the concept of freedom. For Fromm, freedom can be divided into the very dyad of ‘freedom from’ (negative freedom) and ‘freedom to’ (positive freedom) that we have already raised in connection with Hayek. Hayek, the Constant Reader will remember, is (ostensibly) concerned for the most part with ‘freedom from’, that is: absence of coercion. Fromm says that freedom from (hence ‘FF’), while desirable and often fought for, carries dangers within it. It is not a guarantee of happiness. Indeed, it can generate unhappiness, and from thence destruction. (To be clear: Fromm is not offering this view as an apologia for tyranny.) Essentially, Fromm’s idea boils down to saying that the absence of political or social coercion can be deeply unsatisfying because FF, being essentially negative (one does not, for instance, actively experience the absence of a policeman’s boot in the teeth as a pleasure), leaves us without ‘freedom to’ (hence ‘FT’). In capitalist society, we remain alienated.
Fromm goes on, in Marx’s Concept of Man (1961), to describe humanity, alienated in capitalist society, as having a self-orientation which he calls a “marketing orientation”, in which
…man experiences himself as a thing to be employed successfully on the market. He does not experience himself as an active agent, as the bearer of human powers. He is alienated from these powers. … His sense of self does not stem from his activity as a loving and thinking individual, but from his socioeconomic role. If things could speak, a typewriter would answer the question “Who are you?” by saying “I am a typewriter,” and an automobile, by saying “I am an automobile,” or more specifically by saying, “I am a Ford,” or “a Buick,” or “a Cadillac.” If you ask a man “Who are you?”, he answers “I am a manufacturer,” “I am a clerk,” “I am a doctor–or “I am a married man,” “I am the father of two kids,” and his answer has pretty much the same meaning as that of the speaking thing would have. That is the way he experiences himself, not as a man, with love, fear, convictions, doubts, but as that abstraction, alienated from his real nature, which fulfills a certain function in the social system. His sense of value depends on his success: on whether he can sell himself favorably, whether he can make more of himself than he started out with, whether he is a success.
AND THE WOMAN CLOTHED WITH THE SUN: This is not the picture that Dolarhyde worships, which is “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun.” The distinction flummoxed Harris himself, who got the wrong one in Red Dragon, and the most satisfying explanation for this preceding the episode named after the story’s central painting is that Fuller is providing an homage to the error. In any case, this painting is essentially Dolarhyde’s from the opposite perspective. The result is that the woman is the central object of the painting, with the Dragon looming above her, mimicking our own act of looking at her. The picture Dolarhyde prefers is on the whole the far more interesting framing, which we’ll get to next week.
In his researches into Hayek’s role in the decision to hold the 1981 conference of the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) in Pinochet’s Chile, Corey Robin discovered a 1979 letter from Hayek to another MPS member in which he enthusiastically – and, as it transpires, successfully – endorsed Madrid as a conference venue. 
Eruditorum Press is pleased to announce the launch of our latest Kickstarter, for TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7: Sylvester McCoy. 
THE GREAT RED DRAGON: After thirty-three episodes named after food, we change gears abruptly to episodes named after works of art by William Blake. This episode does not designate a specific work but rather a series of four paintings in a larger series of water colors illustrating the Bible completed between 1800 and 1806 four of which have titles beginning “The Great Red Dragon.” Thankfully we still have food to illustrate this episode as part of the delightfully barmy decision to let Hannibal still cook in prison, and we can get on to the Blake works starting next episode. 
Another little detour, away from both the recent starwarsing (which will be continued) and from the main line of all this Austriana. Once again, this is a long version of a section of the essay ‘No Law for the Lions and Many Laws for the Oxen is Liberty’, co-written by myself and Phil for his new book