In suggesting an alternative to Nazi authoritarianism, when attempting to make sense of a world gone mad in Escape from Freedom (1941), Fromm proposes—as did Teilhard de Chardin (1955)—that the basis of freedom must be the sharing of responsibility and commitment. It is the expression of love, according to Fromm, that balances off the need for individual rights (as a vehicle for one to overcome one’s existential anxiety) with the societal need for collective responsibility.
Tension, Love and Grace
The polarity between individual rights and collective responsibility, according to Fromm, provides a dynamic and highly productive tension in society that is ultimately resolved through human love, a mature blending of rights and responsibilities in relationship with other people. Love as an organizing feature of society helps us overcome the inherent insecurities and even terror we associate with mortality. This transcendent awareness, according to Fromm, is under conditions of true freedom, manifested in commitment.
More than a decade later, in his analysis of American culture (1955) Fromm comes to the same conclusion, that love is the overarching, central feature of true, liberating freedom:
There is only one passion which satisfies man’s need to unite himself with the world, and to acquire at the same time a sense of integrity and individuality, and this is love. Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self. It is an experience of sharing, of communion, which permits the full un folding of one’s own inner activity. The experience of love does away with the necessity of illusions. (Fromm, 1955, p. 31).
