| Most reputation studies in the sociology of knowledge focus on canonized intellectuals. Scholars have largely ignored detailed examination of the exclusion of once prominent thinkers. As a contribution to this project, this dissertation analyzes the ideas and the reputational history in America of the German psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm.;Fromm provides rich material for a case study in the sociology of knowledge. In the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s Fromm was an important although controversial figure in the mental health professions, academic sociology and social criticism. Over the last 30 years, however, Fromm's historical contributions and contemporary relevance have been ignored, particularly in the United States. This dissertation documents the "rise and fall" of Fromm's reputation using qualitative historical evidence, quantitative citation data on examples of similar intellectuals drawn from the distinct cultural worlds of the academy, psychoanalysis, Marxism and social criticism and detailed discussion of Fromm's intellectual contributions within each field of knowledge.;Fromm's early success came from the way his ideas were formed in such distinct institutions as psychoanalytic institutes, the Frankfurt School, academic sociology and psychology, the book publishing industry and the social circles around opinion journals and transmitted across the symbolic boundaries that separate these distinct forms of knowledge and institutional practices. Fromm's "optimally marginal" position created his insights yet his multiple ties to distinct intellectual traditions, resources and practices prevented him from being fully a Freudian, a Marxist, a sociologist, a philosopher or a public intellectual. Fromm's decline can be explained by the processes by which these communities of intellectuals excluded challenges to orthodoxies, especially within the "sect-like" intellectual movements of psychoanalysis and Marxism. Fromm's marginality to the institutional arrangements and reward systems, sanctions and cultural worlds within these respective systems of thought allowed him to creatively "escape from orthodoxy" but also doomed his reputation. The case of Erich Fromm thus raises larger questions about the formation of schools of thought, the maintenance of intellectual orthodoxies, the development of innovations and the symbolic boundaries and "origin myths" that constitute forms of knowledge production in distinct fields, particularly in academic and public intellectual thought and intellectual movements. |
