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This is a thoughtful, closely reasoned, and well-argued book that takes very seriously Freud's status as a theorist of culture and philosopher of life and society. Drassinower's strategy relies on a fine-grained exegesis of some passages in Freudian texts that are less written about in the literature than many others, beginning with the 1915 essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” His aim to address the question of whether Freud is indeed a “pessimist” on the question of the possibilities for a just and peaceful world, and whether he really meant it when he wrote in the penultimate sentence of Civilization and Its Discontents that “now it is to be expected that the other of the two ‘Heavenly Powers’ [Eros and Death], eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary”—an expectation he qualified in the final sentence, asking, “But who can foresee with what success and with what result?” (Freud 1930, p. 145). (Apparently he added the final equivocation when Hitler's