But in that passage, he's describing a crucial change in the concept of tolerance. The classical liberal concept of tolerance is more in the nature of, "The Catholics may be papists and blasphemers and enemies of the True Gospel, and I sure don’t want them in league with the government to impose themselves on us true Christian Protestants. But they have a basic right to practice and teach their godawful, hideous version of Christianity freely as long as they can'’t impose it by force on anyone else."
Or, to formulate it in terms of freedom of speech, "Anyone should be free to say any dang fool thing they want, as long as everyone else is free to say what a dang fool thing it is."
Fromm points out that in the later development of society in the 19th and 20th centuries, tolerance took on a broader sense which came to include the notion that in the formal sense, one should not pass judgment on the values of others. He’s not saying that such an approach is altogether wrong. If someone's buying your product, who cares whether he's a Baptist or a Methodist? What he’s saying is that in part, the attitude of general tolerance is illusory.
And in science and medicine, which is he where he goes with his criticism of Freud’s clinical methodology, such an undifferentiated tolerance can be deceptive and even unscientific. One of the longtime themes of the Frankfurt School in general was to critique the positivist approach to social science, which claimed to be value-free in its approach. As Fromm argues here in a particular application, and as others of the Frankfurt School argued more broadly, values can be concealed within ostensible objective frameworks of knowledge or research.
In the various versions of his introductory lecture to his Lectures on the History of Philosophy talked about the notion of partisanship in describing the history of philosophy. On the one hand, he agrees on the need for a "positive" nonpartisanship in the sense of describing philosophies that one disagrees with in an accurate way. Another kind of nonpartisanship would be "merely negative", i.e., describing all of philosophy with a viewpoint that it is all empty, false, mistaken, delusional.
But he points out also that any history, whether of philosophy or politics, has to be partisan in the sense of focusing in on what is essential to the historical task at hand. For instance, in this discussion of Erich Fromm’s article, I could have chosen not to include the quotation from Freud describing his "fundamental technical rule," and instead have dug up some anecdote from Fromm’s childhood to relate instead. But I selected one as having more relevance to the topic at hand than the other, of being more essential to the story being told. That is the sense in which Hegel says "every writer of history must be partisan." The point is not to distort the topic in the service of a personal opinion or that of a party. The point is to make a sensible and informed selection of material: a rational, reality-based partisanship.
Barrington Moore, Jr., who was more of a critic of Frankfurt School thinking than an advocate, expressed an idea that is compatible with the point Fromm makes above, in his essay, "Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook," published in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965):
The dilettante who has "perceptive" but incorrect notions about a hodgepodge of books deserves as much condemnation as the narrow technician creeping up some ladder of promotion by keeping his mouth shut on every issue that matters. Indeed the dilettante deserves greater condemnation because the technician can under appropriate circumstances help to establish worthwhile knowledge. When pseudo-brilliance sheds light, that is purely an accident.Erich Fromm's essay shows that he was clearly breaking sharply with Freud’s methods at this point. But in the 2/1935 number of the journal, Fromm reviews a book by Carl Jung, Wirklichkeit der Seele (1934), in which he gives Jung, long since a bitter critic of Freud and by 1935 an intellectual collaborator with the Nazis, credit for intuitive insights but criticizes his lack of “clear and penetrating thinking.” Fromm was sympathetic to Ferenzci’s criticism of Freud, not so much to Jung’s.
On the other hand, it is absolutely necessary to keep the door open for the chance of a favorable accident, and, much more important, for those truths endeavoring to gain acceptance in the teeth of established orthodoxies. According to the scientific outlook, every idea, including the most dangerous and apparently absurd ones, deserves to have its credentials examined. Still, examining credentials means exactly that. It does not mean accepting the idea. Toleration implies the existence of a distinctive procedure for testing ideas, resembling due process in the realm of law. No one holds that under due process every accused person must be acquitted. A growing and changing procedure for the testing of ideas lies at the heart of any conception of tolerance tied to the scientific outlook. That is genuine tolerance. It has nothing to do with a cacophony of screaming fakers marketing political nostrums in the public square. Nor does the real article exist where various nuances of orthodoxy pass for academic freedom. [my emphasis]
Tags: erich fromm, frankfurt school, freud
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