Communication gap between scholars and the “organisation men (and women)”

In Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse is critical of Erich Fromm: In the beginning, he was a radical theorist, but later he turned to conformity. Marcuse also noted that Fromm, as well as his close colleagues Sullivan and Karen Horney, removed Freud’s libido theory and other radical concepts, which thus reduced psychoanalysis to a set of idealist ethics, which only embrace the status quo. Fromm’s response, in both The Sane Society and in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, argues that Freud indeed deserves substantial credit for recognizing the central importance of the unconscious, but also that he tended to reify his own concepts that depicted the self as the passive outcome of instinct and social control, with minimal volition or variability. Fromm argues that later scholars such as Marcuse accepted these concepts as dogma, whereas social psychology requires a more dynamic theoretical and empirical approach. In reference to Fromm’s leftist political activism as a public intellectual, Noam Chomsky said “I liked Fromm’s attitudes but thought his work was pretty superficial”.

Marcuse characterizes tolerance of repressive speech as “inauthentic”. Instead, he advocates a form of tolerance that is intolerant of repressive (namely right-wing) political movements:

William H. Whyte wrote The Organization Man, originally published by Simon & Schuster in 1956. A key point made was that people became convinced that organizations and groups could make better decisions than individuals, and thus serving an organization became logically preferable to advancing one’s individual creativity. Whyte felt this was counterfactual and listed a number of examples of how individual work and creativity can produce better outcomes than collectivist processes. He observed that this system led to risk-averse executives who faced no consequences and could expect jobs for life as long as they made no egregious missteps. He also thought that everyone should have more freedom.

Whyte identified what he claimed was a “major shift in American ideology” away from an individualistic Protestant Ethic. In actual corporate practice, according to Robert C. Leonard and Reta D. Artz, personnel managers in the San Francisco Bay area generally preferred the organizational man over the individualist. However, individualists were preferred in smaller companies and those with college-educated personnel managers.

Featured Image: