In "Escape from Freedom", Erich Fromm wrote about the tension between our needs for freedom and independence, on the one side, and for belonging and security, on the other. The work was first published more than eighty years ago and now is the right time to revisit it, not so much for the psychoanalytic theory put forward in it, as for the more universal insights into the social and political situation at the time, which in many ways parallel our own.

Fascism is often dismissed as a political phenomenon confined to twentieth-century Europe, but this assumption obscures its enduring ideological structure. Like democracy, fascism abstracts from local history and reappears under diverse conditions, organized around exclusionary nationalism, status grievance, and authoritarian leadership. Treating fascism as merely historical is not only mistaken, it weakens our capacity to recognize and resist its contemporary forms.