Varieties of Destructiveness: A Frommian Perspective on Anti-Democratic Affects

Contemporary liberal democracies are seeing a surge of nihilistic violent extremism, a form of hostility that existing theories of political violence struggle to explain. This article argues that Erich Fromm's neglected social-psychological theory of destructiveness offers crucial resources for understanding this phenomenon. We revisit and systematically update Fromm's distinction between reactive and malignant destructiveness, situating it within recent empirical research on the Need for Chaos and national collective narcissism. Drawing on this reconstruction, we develop a heuristic typology of destructive affects distinguishing situational, social, dispositional and ontological forms of destructiveness. This typology allows disparate phenomena of destructiveness to be analysed within a common framework, sensitising research to hybrid forms and transitions. It enables a more precise sociological account of hostile affects in liberal democracies, capturing both the structural conditions under which destructiveness emerges and the affective logics through which it is mobilised.