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Few intellectuals can lay claim to establishing a discipline. Paul Roazen is one. He began his career on a simple premise in the 1950s as a political scientist. Most political and sociological thinkers—from Plato in his Republic through those who established modern democracy and liberalism (Locke, J. S. Mill), to Marx and his opponent Weber, and, into the twentieth century, to Hannah Arendt and Theodore Adorno—begin with “assumptions” about the nature of
man. Most try to “relate human needs to the demands of social life” (p. 7). Roazen pursued a life's thought, wondering if we can learn something substantive about the psychological nature of humankind through Freud and his students, if we can revise and clarify our thinking about the political and social system. Instead of “assumptions” about our inner lives, can we understand and build social systems based on greater certainties about these inner lives? Roazen explores such concepts as freedom, authority, aggression, and self-hood that are common in both political/social thought and psychoanalysis, yet are disciplines infrequently brought together today.
Psychoanalysis had a bolder era, when not only Freud wrote about civilization and social institutions, but so did others, including Wilhelm Reich, Erik Fromm, Bruno Bettelheim, and Erik Erikson. I will return to them and our more restrained contemporary stance later on.
This book, Roazen's thirteenth, summarizes his life's work on these questions. It is a quiet, humbling, yet important paean to how psychoanalysis has and can contribute to understanding political and social organizations, and possibly how to build them to better serve human needs, while satisfying the demands of social life.
The book, essentially two books, is hinged on a central chapter, “Freud's Power.”
Part one reads like a thoughtful series of lectures on John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Freud, and Dostoevsky, as well as other thinkers about the body politic. Roazen begins with the personal: Mills' (r