ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at Erich Fromm's psychoanalytic social psychology and studies of social character within the context of the rise and consolidation of sociology as a discipline. Surveying the entirety of Fromm's corpus, it is clear that it represents a complex body of social psychology, social philosophy, social commentary and politics amongst other things that, in many respects, escapes easy categorization. It discusses Fromm's largely under-acknowledged role in the early phase of the Institut fr Sozialforschung, in which he and Max Horkheimer were the main drivers of an interdisciplinary programme which sought to unite the social sciences with philosophy in a long-lasting collaboration aimed at lessening the arbitrary injustice of social life. Finally, the chapter looks respectively at Fromm's more or less forgotten empirical social-characterological case studies of manual and white collar workers in Weimar Germany and of the inhabitants of a peasant village in Mexico.
