Fromm diverged from Horkheimer and Adorno by affirming a philosophical anthropology of human nature.

Evidence

What he absorbed from his Jewish antecedents was, however, very different from that apparently taken by Horkheimer and Adorno from theirs. Instead of stressing the nonrepresentational quality of truth and the impossibility of defining the essential man, Fromm affirmed the notion of a philosophical anthropology. Like Martin Buber and others in the Lehrhaus circle, he understood man’s nature as something created through relatedness to the world and interaction with others. This was to appear most vividly in his later works after his departure from the Institut, but at all times Fromm affirmed the reality of a human nature. It was, however, not a fixed concept like the Roman natura, but rather an idea of man’s potential nature, similar to the Greek physis. Accordingly, Fromm always put great emphasis on the anthropological implications of Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 321

Categorization

• XREF: Divides the Frankfurt School along the philosophical-anthropology question; pairs with the chapter’s broader account of how Jewish antecedents shaped the founders differently, and with Fromm’s later humanist psychology vs. Adorno/Horkheimer’s anti-essentialism. — connects to: Adorno and Horkheimer rejected total identity with nature as regressive stasis — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 803; Human culture originates in the socially mediated relation between man and nature; Fromm proposed a historical-materialist anthropology fusing psychoanalysis with sociology. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 216

Broader Connections

• Adorno and Horkheimer rejected total identity with nature as regressive stasis #complicates (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 803
• Human culture originates in the socially mediated relation between man and nature #complicates (0.72)