How to Become a Forgotten Intellectual: Intellectual Movements and the Rise and Fall of Erich Fromm

The ideas and reputational history of German psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm are examined as a case study in the sociology of knowledge that explores how intellectual boundaries are constructed within and between disciplines in the modem academy, psychoanalytic institutes, and the journal and book reading publics and among the intellectual elite. The “rise and fall” of Erich Fromm is narrated using the foil of Michèle Lament's analysis of how Derrida became a dominant philosopher and influence on literary criticism. The example of how Fromm became a forgotten intellectual is used to examine various models of how reputations are constructed. My analysis highlights the importance of the sectlike culture of psychoanalysis and Marxism as well as the boundary-maintaining processes of academic disciplines, schools of thought, and intellectual traditions, and suggests a research agenda on orthodoxies and revisionism within intellectual movements more generally.