UI Press | Edited by Kevin Anderson and Richard Quinney | Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology: Beyond the Punitive Society

Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology

Beyond the Punitive Society

Awards and Recognition:

Winner of the International Erich Fromm Prize, 2000.

The editors examine the influential writings of Fromm (his 100th Anniversary is in 2000) as they apply to criminology, showing how his humanist perspective can make for a more effective and humane way of dealing with crime and criminals.

Linking the writings of the great humanist psychologist Erich Fromm to criminology, this collection shows how viewing crime patterns and the criminal justice system from Fromm's humanist perspective opens a path to more effective and more humane ways of understanding and dealing with crime and criminals. Contributors to Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology draw on Fromm's writings on alienation, sadomasochism, and patriarchal/matriarchal values to assess the kinds of crimes being committed and the kinds of people committing them. They explore the spiritual and intellectual sources of Fromm's thought--including Jewish theology, Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Buddhism--and demonstrate how his socialist humanism points toward a society free of crime and violence. This volume also includes translations of two of Fromm's early articles on criminal justice, never before available in English, in which he develops a psychoanalytic Marxist critique of the role of criminal justice in a class society. At a time when American society seems bent, to an unprecedented degree, on imprisonment, executions, and other violent responses to the problem of crime, Fromm's humanist critique offers a unique vantage point from which to renew and develop a critical criminology.