Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology: Beyond the Punitive Society - Tapa dura

ADVANCE PRAISE "Now more than ever we need voices of humanity and critical reason to address the scandalous injustice of the so called 'criminal justice' system in the United States. The name of the eminent psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm, may at first seem a surprising addition to enter these lists, but as this valuable collection of his criminological essays along with contemporary work inspired by him shows, it is a welcome and entirely appropriate one." -- Joel Kovel, author of The Age of Desire: Reflections of a Radical Psychoanalyst "I consider this volume to be among the most important works of criminological theory to appear in my more than three decades in the field." -- Hal Pepinsky, professor of criminal justice, Indiana University

Linking the writings of the great humanist psychologist Erich Fromm to criminology, this collection shows how viewing crime patterns and the criminal justice system from Fromm's humanist perspective opens a path to more effective and more humane ways of understanding and dealing with crime and criminals. Contributors to "Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology" draw on Fromm's writings on alienation, sadomasochism, and patriarchal/matriarchal values to assess the kinds of crimes being committed and the kinds of people committing them. They explore the spiritual and intellectual sources of Fromm's thought - including Jewish theology, Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Buddhism - and demonstrate how his socialist humanism points toward a society free of crime and violence. This volume also includes translations of two of Fromm's early articles on criminal justice, never before available in English, in which he develops a psychoanalytic Marxist critique of the role of criminal justice in a class society. At a time when American society seems bent, to an unprecedented degree, on imprisonment, executions, and other violent responses to the problem of crime, Fromm's humanist critique offers a unique vantage point from which to renew and develop a critical criminology.