The Sane Society is an ambitious work.
Its scope is as broad as the question: What does it mean to live in modern society?
A work so broad, even when it is directed by a leading idea and informed by a moral vision, must necessarily "fail".
Even a hasty reader will easily find in it numerous blind spots, errors of fact and argument, important exclusions, areas of ignorance and prejudice, undue emphases on trivia, examples of broad positions supported by flimsy evidence, and the like.
Such books are easy prey for critics.
Nor need the critic be captious.
A careful and orderly man, who values precision and a kind of tough intellectual responsibility, might easily be put off by such a book.
It is a simple matter, for one so disposed, to take a work like The Sane Society and shred it into odds and ends.
The thing can be made to look like the cluttered attic of a large and vigorous family -- a motley jumble of discarded objects, some outworn and some that were never useful, some once whole and bright but now chipped and tarnished, some odd pieces whose history no one remembers, here and there a gem, everything fascinating because it suggests some part of the human condition -- the whole adding up to nothing more than a glimpse into the disorderly history of the makers and users.

That could be easily done, but there is little reason in it.
It would come down to saying that Fromm paints with a broad brush, and that, after all, is not a conclusion one must work toward but an impression he has from the outset.
I mention these features of the book because they are inherent in the book's character and therefore must be mentioned.
It would be superfluous to build a critique around them.
There are more substantial criticisms to be made of Fromm's account of capitalist civilization.

It is worthwhile to recall that Fromm's treatment has both descriptive and normative aspects.
Since I have already discussed his moral position, that discussion is incorporated by reference into the following pages, which will focus on the empirical and analytic side of Fromm's treatment.
I shall first indicate a couple of weaknesses in Fromm's analysis, then argue that, granted these weaknesses, he still has much left that is valuable, and, finally, raise the general question of a philosophical versus a sociological approach to the question of alienation.

Almost no empirical work has been done on the problem of alienation.
Despite its rather long intellectual history, alienation is still a promising hypothesis and not a verified theory.
The idea has received much attention in philosophy, in literature, and in a few works of general social criticism, such as The Sane Society.
What is missing is work that would answer, presumably by the use of survey methods and Guttman-type attitude scales, such questions as these: What are the components of the feeling-state described as alienation?
How widespread is alienation?
What is its incidence among the various classes and subgroups of the population?
Taking alienation as a dependent variable, with what socio-structural factors is it most highly associated?
Considered as an independent variable, how does it affect behavior in various sectors of life?
Until such work is done, there must remain the nagging suspicion that alienation may be little more than an expression of the malaise of the intellectual, who, rejected by and in turn rejecting the larger society, projects his own fear and despair onto the broader social screen.

I am not suggesting that Fromm ought to do this kind of work.
Nor do I think that alienation is nothing more than a projection of the malaise of the intellectual.
I am saying only that until a fuller and different kind of evidence comes in, any discussion of alienation must be understood to have certain important limitations.

Until such evidence appears, we must make do with the evidence we have.
Here, perhaps, Fromm is vulnerable, for he does not always use the best and most recent evidence available, and he sometimes selects and interprets the evidence in rather special ways.
Three examples follow.

Fromm's analysis of alienation in the sphere of production centers around the concepts of the bureaucratization of the corporation, the separation of ownership from control, and the broad (and thus from the point of view of corporate control, ineffective) dispersion of stock ownership.
For all these points he relies exclusively on Berle and Means's study of 1932, The Modern Corporation And Private Property.
The broad conclusions of that pioneering work remain undisturbed, but subsequent research has expanded and somewhat altered their empirical support, has suggested important revisions in the general analytic frame of reference, and has sharpened the meaning of particular analytic concepts in this area.
Fromm seems unaware of these developments.

Another example is his very infrequent use of the large amount of data from surveys designed to discover what and how people actually do feel and think on a broad range of topics: he cites such survey-type findings just three times.
Moreover, the conclusions he draws from the findings are not always the only ones possible.
For example, he cites the following data from two studies on job satisfaction: in the first study, 85 per cent of professionals and executives, 64 per cent of white collar people, and 41 per cent of factory workers expressed satisfaction with their jobs;
in the second study, the percentages were 86 for professionals, 74 for managerial persons, 42 for commercial employees, 56 for skilled workers, and 48 for semi-skilled workers.
He concludes that these data show a "remarkably high" percentage of consciously dissatisfied and unhappy persons among factory and clerical workers.
Starting from other value premises than Fromm's, some analysts might conclude that the percentages really tell us very little at all, while others might even conclude that the figures are remarkably low.
Eric Hoffer, for example, once said that America was a paradise -- the only one in the history of the world -- for workingmen and small children.
What matters is that while Fromm's reading of the data is not the only one possible, it is precisely the one we would expect from a writer who earnestly believes that every man can and ought to be happy and satisfied.
Fromm also cites a poll on attitudes toward work restriction conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation in 1945, in which 49 per cent of manual workers said a man ought to turn out as much as he could in a day's work, while 41 per cent said he should not do his best but should turn out only the average amount.
Fromm says these data show that job dissatisfaction and resentment are widespread.
That is one way to read the findings, but again there are other ways.
One might use such findings to indicate the strength of informal primary associations in the factory, an interpretation which would run counter to Fromm's theory of alienation.
Or, he might remind Fromm that the 41 per cent figure is really astonishingly low: after all, the medieval guild system was dedicated to the proposition that 100 per cent of the workers ought to turn out only the average amount;
and today's trade unions announce pretty much the same view.

In view of these shortcomings in both the amount and the interpretation of survey-type findings on public opinion, and considering the criticisms which can be brought against Fromm's philosophical anthropology, such a passage as the following cannot be taken seriously.
"Are people happy, are they as satisfied, unconsciously, as they believe themselves to be?
Considering the nature of man, and the conditions for happiness, this can hardly be so".

The ambiguities suggested above stem from a more basic difficulty in Fromm's style of thought.
He seems to use the term alienation in two different ways.
Sometimes he uses it as a subjective, descriptive term, and sometimes as an objective, diagnostic one.
That is, sometimes it is used to describe felt human misery, and other times it is postulated to explain unfelt anxiety and discontent.
The failure to keep these two usages distinct presents hazards to the reader.
It also permits Fromm to do some dubious things with empirical findings.
When alienation is used as an objective and diagnostic category, for example, it becomes clear that Fromm would have to say that awareness of alienation goes far toward conquering it.
(He, in effect, does say this in his discussion of the pseudo-happiness of the automaton conformist.
) Starting from this, and accepting his estimate of the iniquities of modern society, it would follow that the really disturbing evidence of alienation would be that of a work-satisfaction survey which reported widespread, stated worker satisfaction, rather than widespread, stated worker dissatisfaction.

The point is that in a system such as Fromm's which recognizes unconscious motivations, and which rests on certain ethical absolutes, empirical data can be used to support whatever proposition the writer is urging at the moment.
Thus, in the example cited above Fromm rests his whole case on the premise that the workers are being deprived unconsciously, unknowingly, of fulfillment, and then supports this with survey data reporting conscious, experienced frustrations.
He has his cake and eats it too: if the workers say they are dissatisfied, this shows conscious alienation;
if they say they are satisfied, this shows unconscious alienation.
This sort of manipulation is especially troublesome in Fromm's work because, although his system is derived largely from certain philosophic convictions, he asserts that it is based on empirical findings drawn both from social science and from his own consulting room.
While the "empirical psychoanalytic" label which Fromm claims sheds no light on the validity of his underlying philosophy, it does increase the marketability of his product.

The final example of the failure to use available evidence, though evidence of a different kind from that which has so far been considered, comes from Fromm's treatment of some other writers who have dealt with the same themes.
In a brief chapter dealing with "Various Other Diagnoses", he quotes isolated passages from some writers whose views seem to corroborate his own, and finds it "most remarkable that a critical view of twentieth-century society was already held by a number of thinkers living in the nineteenth."
He finds it equally "remarkable that their critical diagnosis and prognosis should have so much in common among themselves and with the critics of the twentieth century".
There is nothing remarkable about this at all.
It is largely a matter of finding passages that suit one's purposes.
There is a difference between evidence and illustration, and Fromm's citation of the other diagnosticians fits the latter category.
Glance at the list: Burckhardt, Tolstoy, Proudhon, Thoreau, London, Marx, Tawney, Mayo, Durkheim, Tannenbaum, Mumford, A. R. Heron, Huxley, Schweitzer, and Einstein.
This is a delightfully motley collection.
One can make them say the same thing only by not listening to them very carefully and hearing only what one wants to hear.
The method of selection Fromm uses achieves exactly that.
Furthermore, the list is interesting for its omissions.
It omits, for example, practically the whole line of great nineteenth century English social critics, nearly all the great writers whose basic position is religious, and all those who are with more or less accuracy called Existentialists.
Of course, the list also excludes all writers who are fairly "optimistic" about the modern situation;
these, almost by definition, are spokesmen for an alienated ideology.
It is not hard to find that concurrence of opinion which Fromm finds so remarkable when you ignore all who hold a different opinion.

Turning from these problems of the use of evidence, one meets another type of difficulty in Fromm's analysis, which is his loose and ambiguous use of certain important terms.
One such instance has already been presented: his use of alienation.
The only other one I shall mention here is his use of the term capitalism.

For Fromm, capitalism is the enemy, the root of all evil.
It is of course useful to have a sovereign cause on one's social criticism, for it makes diagnosis and prescription much easier than they might otherwise be.