Fromm was at the height of his fame and scholarly status in 1955 after the publication of The Sane Society but in 1955–1956, two publishing events occurred that led to his rapid decline in prestige. This broader reputational decline led to the eventual forgetting of his role as one of the disciplines’ great public sociologists. The Fromm– Marcuse debate in Dissent magazine in 1955–1956 and the publication of The Art of Loving in 1956 seriously damaged Fromm's intellectual reputation. The decline in his scholarly stature took decades but Fromm was no longer cited in professional sociology by the 1980s and early 1990s. This in turn made him unavailable as a resource and inspiration for the revival of ‘public sociology’ in the early years of the twenty-first century. This history is worth revisiting.

In 1955, Frankfurt School-associated German philosopher Herbert Marcuse was in exile in the United States and was just about to publish Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1956a). Marcuse adapted the appendix of his book on what he viewed as the radical Freud and published it as an essay attacking Fromm and the neo-Freudians in the left-wing magazine, Dissent. Dissent was a journal with low circulation but high intellectual status and was central to the world of what intellectual historians call ‘The New York Intellectuals’ (Wald, 2017). The rebuttal and counter-rebuttal exchange between Fromm and Marcuse eventually became known as the Fromm– Marcuse debate among critical theorists and intellectual historians. Their dialogue played a major role in both creating Marcuse's reputation as an important radical intellectual during the 1960s era and in damaging Fromm's scholarly and intellectual standing, especially in the United States.

The fact that Fromm published the best-selling book The Art of Loving just after the Fromm– Marcuse debate was a fateful coincidence. The Art of Loving was an analysis of the contradictions of love in market societies. It sold over 25 million copies worldwide and was translated into more than twenty-two languages. Fromm's enemies jumped on the book, using a distorted reading of it to unfairly define him as the Norman Vincent Peale of the left. Peale was a popular Protestant minister famous in the United States for his notion of the ‘power of positive thinking’.