Fromm held that authoritarian societies both create and satisfy sadomasochistic needs

Evidence

Authoritarian forms of society, so termed by Fromm with reference to the widespread discussion which had been going on since the late 1920s about an authoritarian, total state, were characterized by the way in which every member of society was incorporated into a system of dependency relations with those above and below. For Fromm, this represented a precondition for the existence of functional interplay between the sado-masochistic character and the authoritarian form of society. We have attempted to show', he stated in conclusion, that the authoritarian structure of society both creates and satisfies needs which develop on the basis of sado-masochism.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 616

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the Frankfurt School’s later work on the authoritarian personality and Adorno’s F-scale, the empirical counterpart to this theoretical claim. — connects to: Fromm conflated sadomasochistic character with authoritarian society, losing the psychological dimension — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 616
• SEED: An essay angle: how Fromm’s thesis that authoritarian social structure both creates and satisfies sadomasochistic needs explains contemporary authoritarian populism as a psychodynamic phenomenon rather than a rational-choice one.