Masochism, Authoritarianism, and the Crowd

A Frommian Reading of Steinbeck’s “In Dubious Battle”

Abstract

This essay rereads John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle (1936) through Erich Fromm’s theory of escape mechanisms, arguing that the novelist and the German analyst arrived at strikingly similar ideas independently of one another, working within roughly the same years. This case of parallel thinking reveals significant, previously unexamined links between Steinbeck’s phalanx theory and Fromm’s framework, later developed in Escape from Freedom (1941). The pairing helps push back against a critical tradition – running from Edmund Wilson through Harold Bloom to Leslie Fiedler – that has dismissed Steinbeck’s characters as psychologically shallow, verging on the “animal.” Psychological depth, the essay argues, is very much present – it just isn’t conveyed through introspection, but through the unstable, often destructive relationship between the individual and the group. The analysis focuses on the arc of Jim Nolan, the young Communist organizer at the center of the novel. Drawing on Fromm’s concept of masochism – the attempt to escape the burden of individual freedom by dissolving oneself into a cause larger than the self – the essay follows Jim’s trajectory: from an initial torpor, the product of a meaningless life ground down by capitalist exploitation and a broken family history, through his absorption into Party ideology, to the moment this masochistic disposition flips into a sadistic, authoritarian assertion of self. That reversal, the essay contends, doesn’t betray the character’s internal logic but completes it: for Fromm, masochism and sadism share the same underlying inability to bear individual aloneness. Steinbeck, the essay concludes, is far from undermining the workers’ cause; if anything, he strengthens it, showing that real political commitment depends on holding onto one’s individual conscience rather than losing it in the crowd.