Fromm's declining health in the later part of the 1960s called him home to Europe. Living out the last decade of his life on a lake at Locarno, Switzerland, Fromm finished his academic career with two major scholarly books: Social Character in a Mexican Village (written with Michael Maccoby, 1970) and The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973). These two books represent Fromm's final framing of his intellectual and public sociological legacy and a response to the criticisms of social character theory and his revision of psychoanalysis respectively. Contrary to the myth that Fromm had become a purely popular writer who produced little of academic value (Coser, 1984; Friedman, 2013), these two books were his most scholarly despite being published by commercial presses. Social Character and Anatomy represent Fromm's analytic voice and a return to the scholarly writing he did in the 1930s and 1940s.

Reminiscent of the working class in Weimar and authoritarian family studies conducted while part of the Frankfurt School, Fromm had a number of goals for Social Character in a Mexican Village. First, he wanted to provide evidence for his theory of social character by revisiting and refining the interpretive questionnaire method from the Weimar study in the late 1920s and early 1930s using Mexico as a case study. Second, he wanted to provide policy advice on local village development to different levels of government. In addition, he raised normative questions about existing theories of capitalist growth for what was then referred to as the Third World (Fromm and Maccoby, 1970; Maccoby and McLaughlin, 2020). The book was thus professional, policy and critical sociology.

The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness was a continuation of Fromm's earlier revisions of psychoanalytic theory in order to develop a theory of violence. Drawing from the mechanism of ‘destructiveness’ in Escape from Freedom, and account of ‘necrophilia’ in The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (1964), Fromm responded to the charge that he was a simplistic and naive proponent of feel-good thinking. Fromm articulated a psychoanalytically influenced interdisciplinary theoretical account of human violence that avoided both liberal optimism and sociobiological pessimism. The book was to be both part of his psychoanalytic legacy and a public sociology intervention in public debates about violence and human nature.