Sign-In
Cart
The Escape Artists: Erich Fromm and the Manufactured Self
Paperback
Please select the version of book you would like to purchase.
ISBN13: 9798180455666
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 7 2026
Pages: 214
Weight: 0.64
Height: 0.45 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 7 2026
Pages: 214
Weight: 0.64
Height: 0.45 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
We were promised freedom, and we got it. Then we did something Erich Fromm saw coming: we panicked, looked at the open door, and quietly built ourselves a more comfortable cage. We called the bars by friendlier names-convenience, stability, the right kind of life-and we locked ourselves in with a smile.
Fromm spent his life mapping that retreat. He watched the twentieth century hand human beings the keys to their own lives and watched human beings hand the keys right back to whoever promised to take the weight. He called it the escape from freedom, and he warned that a person who cannot bear his own depths will always find a master, a crowd, or a brand to bear it for him.
This book takes Fromm at his word and follows him into a world he never lived to see but described with uncanny precision-a world of swipes and likes, of personal brands and curated selves, of love reduced to an algorithm of matches and intimacy flattened into content. Chapter by chapter, it carries his ideas forward, not as a museum tour of a dead thinker but as a living, sardonic argument about why it is still so frightening to be a real person, and what it might cost to stop running.
Witty where it can be and serious where it must be, The Escape Artists is for anyone who has ever suspected that the self they perform for the world is not quite the self they meet at three in the morning. Fromm had a single, stubborn piece of advice for that moment. Do not run. Look.
This book takes Fromm at his word and follows him into a world he never lived to see but described with uncanny precision-a world of swipes and likes, of personal brands and curated selves, of love reduced to an algorithm of matches and intimacy flattened into content. Chapter by chapter, it carries his ideas forward, not as a museum tour of a dead thinker but as a living, sardonic argument about why it is still so frightening to be a real person, and what it might cost to stop running.
Witty where it can be and serious where it must be, The Escape Artists is for anyone who has ever suspected that the self they perform for the world is not quite the self they meet at three in the morning. Fromm had a single, stubborn piece of advice for that moment. Do not run. Look.
Also from
Kriger, Boris
Why We Don't Fly Like Birds: Gravity, Anatomy, and the Metaphysics of Freedom
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
The Evil of Banality: Hannah Arendt, Frames, Awareness, and the Refusal to Look Away
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$24.00
Freedom from Taxes: Introduction of Automated Payment Transaction Tax and Universal Basic Income
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$9.60
Why the Universe Is Not a Lottery: Attractors and the End of Cosmic Coincidence
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$30.00
The Arithmetic of Happiness: How Jeremy Bentham Tried to Count the Human Soul
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$26.40
Cutting the Continuum: Zeno's Paradoxes from the Bounded Observer to the Edge of the Cosmos
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
A Theory of the Cinematic Masterpiece in the Generative Era: Temporal Sovereignty, the Carriers of Density, and Why Technical Progress Makes Art Deare
Halushko, Denys
Kriger, Boris
Kriger, Peter
Paperback
$13.20
Absurd Faith for an Absurd World: The Tertullian Paradox in the Age of Unreason
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$17.20
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: How Accusation Became the World's Favorite Pastime
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
The Bluff of Decolonization in Controlled Chaos: Frantz Fanon and the Invisible Chains
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$26.40
The Morality Trap: How Humanity's Noblest Idea Became Its Most Dangerous Weapon
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$26.40
The Last Absolutism: Why Companies Are the Final Refuge of Autocracy
Kaminski, Jaroslaw F.
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
Theories That Outlive Their Reasons: Maxwell, and What Unification Actually Means
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$32.40
Homo Symbolicus: Ernst Cassirer, the Philosopher Who Won the Argument and Lost the Century
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$30.00
How Knowledge Breaks and Remakes Itself: Thomas Kuhn and the Secret Life of Scientific Change
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
Also in
Philosophy
In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument
Williams, Bernard
Paperback
$46.25
The American Indian Mind in a Linear World: American Indian Studies and Traditional Knowledge
Fixico, Donald Lee
Paperback
$72.79
Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media
Lowenstein, Adam
Paperback
$51.00
Machine Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Spiritual Freedom and the Re-Animation of Matter
Lafitte, Luke
Paperback
From $14.99
The Sociogony: Social Facts and the Ontology of Objects, Things, and Monsters
Worrell, Mark P.
Paperback
$43.50
On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence: Unpublished and Selected Writings
Pirsig, Robert M.
Pirsig, Wendy K.
Hardcover
$25.64
Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida
Roudinesco, Elisabeth
Paperback
$42.00
The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the Addition of Practic of the New Science
Vico, Giambattista
Paperback
$43.43
Friendship and Society: An Introduction to Augustine's Practical Philosophy
Burt, Donald X.
Paperback
$28.49
The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance
Gottlieb, Anthony
Paperback
$9.99
The Modes of Scepticism: Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations
Annas, Julia
Barnes, Jonathan
Julia, Annas
Paperback
$48.84
Essays V2: Moral And Entertaining On The Various Faculties And Passions Of The Human Mind (1815)
Clarendon, Edward Hyde Earl of
Paperback
$37.44
The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
Hanselman, Stephen
Holiday, Ryan
Hardcover
From $12.99
The Obstacle Is the Way Expanded 10th Anniversary Edition: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph
Holiday, Ryan
Hardcover
$26.60
The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us
Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger
Hardcover
From $19.99
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Godfrey-Smith, Peter
Paperback
$19.00
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse Fifth Anniversary Limited Edition: The Global Bestseller
Mackesy, Charlie
Hardcover
$28.49
The Courage to Be Ordinary: Discover Your Surprising Superpower for a Thriving Life
Kishimi, Ichiro
Paperback
$18.04
Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us about Living
Jones, Peter
Hardcover
$27.00
My Big TOE Awakening Discovery Inner Workings: The Complete My Big TOE Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics and Metaphysics
Campbell, Thomas
Hardcover
$56.53
The Ethical Slut, Third Edition: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love
Hardy, Janet W.
Easton, Dossie
Paperback
From $11.99
Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion, and Social Order in the Kali Yuga
Evola, Julius
Hardcover
$28.45
Self-Reliance and Nature: The Complete First and Second Series of Emerson's Essays
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Hardcover
$24.99