Fromm grounded his ideal of spontaneity in asserted inherent human qualities rather than argument.

Evidence

With regard to the diagnostic and analytical sections of the book, the spontaneity which Fromm supported was a deus ex machina. He simply appealed to the fact that certain qualities were `inherent’ in human beings, in the term used by Thomas Jefferson, whom he cited in one of his epigraphs, or that they had become inherent as a result of historical development. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 295

Categorization

• XREF: Part of the Frankfurt School’s internal criticism of Fromm; pairs with Fromm’s suppressed Weimar workers’ study. — connects to: The Rights of Man were grounded in a supposed human nature rather than history — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 728; Fromm diverged from Horkheimer and Adorno by affirming a philosophical anthropology of human nature. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 321; Human nature is the totality of historically determined social relations, not a fixed essence. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 617
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: The Rights of Man were grounded in a supposed human nature rather than history — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 728; Fromm diverged from Horkheimer and Adorno by affirming a philosophical anthropology of human nature. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 321; Human nature is the totality of historically determined social relations, not a fixed essence. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 617