The world was in flames and chaos in 1940 when Erich Fromm was finishing writing his book Escape from Freedom (1941) and living in exile in New York City. Hitler dominated Europe with Nazi firepower and war making, and fascists were in power in Italy, Japan, and Spain. Stalin ruled Russia with brutality and an iron hand while fighting Hitler on his western front before the United States joined the war. The Battle of Britain raged in the air over the United Kingdom with Prime Minister Churchill promising a fight to the death while President Roosevelt in the United States was still debating America's role in this increasingly global conflict on the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was in this context that Erich Fromm published Escape from Freedom with Farrar and Rinehart, a major New York commercial book press. With this soon-to-be best-selling book, Fromm entered the stage as a public sociologist with a theoretical and political intervention that would help define the debate about fascism for a generation of intellectuals. The book outlined the research agenda he would follow for the rest of his life and it would make him famous.

Fromm was a left-wing Jewish exile from Nazism, living in New York City. He was making a living from his therapeutic practice with a safety net provided by a significant settlement he had received when he gave up his tenured status with the Frankfurt School led by Max Horkheimer. Before Escape from Freedom, Fromm's writings had been mostly theoretical and empirical papers (predominantly in German although increasingly in English) all written for academic and clinical audiences of his peers. Fromm had been writing the manuscript for a number of years around themes of authoritarianism, but it was in the course of a letter exchange with Robert Lynd, a well-known Columbia University sociologist (Friedman, 2013), that he turned towards the meaning and implications of freedom in modernity. Fromm faced first hand the danger the Nazi regime posed to Europe and the world. He played a central role in persuading the critical theorists to leave Germany (Wheatland, 2009) and was engaged throughout the 1930s in trying to get Jewish relatives out of the country before it was too late. The book was a warning as well as a theoretical analysis.