Optimal Marginality: Innovation and Orthodoxy in Fromm's Revision of Psychoanalysis

The sociological study of intellectual innovation has long been polarized between romantic notions of the creative marginal intellectual and competing accounts stressing the benefits of national, organizational and network centrality in the production of knowledge. I offer the concept of “optimal marginality” as an attempt to move beyond this longstanding but increasingly stale debate. The relationship between a certain type of marginality and …