Socialist Humanism an International Symposium

For several years afterwards, this volume was the only widely circulated book on socialism in the US. It comprised essays by some thirty-five noted intellectuals, among them over a dozen from within Eastern Europe, most of them philosophical dissidents, but also a few who hewed more towards the party line. The more dissident Marxist humanists included several who would become prominent in the upheavals of the 1960s in the Eastern bloc, most notably the Prague Spring of 1968. Among the intellectuals from what was then Czechoslovakia were the Marxist humanists Karel Kosík and Ivan Svitak, while Poland was represented by Bronislaw Baczko as well as the more pro-party Adam Schaff, a personal friend of Fromm. What was then Yugoslavia had a particularly large representation, with a number of figures from the dissident philosophers of the Praxis group, among them Mihailo Markovic, Gajo Petrovic and Rudi Supek. From Western Europe, North America and Australia the volume drew upon Marxist philosophers like Marcuse, Dunayevskaya, Goldmann, Ernst Bloch and Eugene Kamenka. As Fromm himself acknowledged in his introduction to the volume, it lacked representation from the Third World.