Modern individual freedom simultaneously produces isolation and readiness for new bondage

Evidence

It has been the thesis of this book that freedom has a twofold meaning for modern man: that he has been freed from traditional authorities and has become an `individual’, but that at the same time he has become isolated, powerless, and an instrument of purposes outside himself, alienated from himself and others; furthermore, that this state undermines his self, weakens and frightens him, and makes him ready for submission to new kinds of bondage … Only if man masters society and subordinates the economic machine to the purposes of human happiness, and only if he actively participates in the social process, can he overcome what now drives him to despairhis aloneness and his feeling of powerlessness … democracy … will triumph over the forces of nihilism only if it can imbue people with a faith that is the strongest the human mind is capable of, the faith in life and truth, and in freedom as the active and spontaneous realization of the individual self. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1127

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distills Fromm’s thesis on the two-sided nature of modern freedom — the core concept this chapter critiques.
• XREF: This is the classic Fromm formulation from Escape from Freedom; connects to Horkheimer/Adorno’s dialectic of enlightenment on how emancipation reverts to domination. — connects to: Unlimited individual freedom breeds new repression through natural inequality — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 534; Perpetual debt serves to escape the burden of freedom — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 30

Broader Connections

• Unlimited individual freedom breeds new repression through natural inequality #corroborates (0.80) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 534