Behavior: Fromm on Aggression

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Fromm is often eloquent as a chronicler of society's sicknesses, but he gives only cursory attention to their cures. Sadism will disappear, he says, "when exploitative control of any class, sex, or minority group has been done away with." This can be done "only if the whole [social and political] system as it has existed during the last 6,000 years of history can be replaced by a fundamentally different one."

At times, Fromm's premises seem as sweeping as those Utopian prescriptions. His picture of the peace-loving primitive man is unconvincing ("Wars among primitive hunters are characteristically unbloody"). His explanation for the rise of patriarchal rule during the urban revolution seems equally shaky ("No longer the womb, but the mind became the creative power, and with this, not women, but men dominated society").

In the end, in spite of the distinctions Fromm tries to make between his approach and Skinner's, he falls victim to his own criticisms of the behaviorists. As with Skinner, his recommendations that society change its "system of production, ownership and consumption" depend on faith in man's manipulability and desire to change.