By 1975, Fromm was essentially a forgotten public sociologist in the United States and the English-speaking world. Yet Fromm's analysis of the mechanisms of escape involved in both far-right-wing movements and left-wing authoritarianism, his emphasis on the distorting power of the market as it permeates character and reshapes personalities, his contribution to theories of alienation and the development of humanistic Marxism, and his empirical work on the relationship between social character, alienated work, and economic development all brought insights and ideas into sociology.

Fromm's theoretical account of the power of emotions, passions and narcissism in human destructiveness and his insights into the psychosocial logic of social life (McLaughlin, 2019) are sociological perspectives worthy of renewed attention. The undertheorized power of emotions amplified so intensely by social media today (Gardner and Davis, 2013; Lukiannoff and Haidt, 2018) has become apparent to sociologists who prematurely dismissed psychoanalytic insights (Cavalletto and Silver, 2014). Fromm's unique account of human nature and motivations, and his pioneering critique of the patriarchal and the positivistic limitations of Freud's theories, are an indispensable intellectual resource for social theory today.

Fromm's pathbreaking role is a largely unacknowledged part of the history of public sociology. There was no Marxist sociology in America when Fromm published Escape from Freedom but conservative sociologist Edward Shils understood the importance of this book. In The Calling of Sociology (1980), Shils argued that Escape from Freedom offered:

Assisting in Americans’ self-understanding, Fromm also ‘offered a critique of the social order of capitalism’ that applied to the ‘situation of the United States as well as Germany’ (Shils, 1980 p 113). Shils was famously pro-West and pro-capitalist and opposed the rise of academic Marxism that swept American sociology in the 1960s and 1970s. Shils was insightful and honest enough, however, to see how pivotal Fromm's Escape from Freedom was for the radicalization of sociology.