The Wish to be Free. Society, Psyche and Value Change: By Fred Weinstein and Gerald M. Platt. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970. 319 pp.

This volume is the product of the collaboration of a historian from the State University of New York and a Harvard sociologist. Their thorough familiarity with psychoanalytic literature adds a dimension to this historical study of the changing values in modern man's striving for autonomy and freedom. An attempt is made to synthesize sociologic theories and psychoanalytic conceptualizations, thus correcting what the authors consider Freud's biological bias—the cause, they believe, of the neglect of his work by sociologists.

Weinstein and Platt try to develop a general theory to explain the commitment of modern man to the principles of autonomy. Armed with a thorough knowledge of the pertinent historical and philosophical material, they present the reader with a penetrating analysis of the French Enlightenment, Rousseau as the 'ambivalent democrat', and Robespierre with his 'retreat to authority'. In presenting this material the authors provide us with important insight into the historical and psychological processes preceding the French Revolution and the emancipation of the individual. At the same time they explain, in terms of psychoanalytic concepts, the inevitable setbacks and regressions that occurred. In this connection one wishes that they had supplied data to account for Robespierre's turning from the struggle for freedom to the advocacy of terror. They describe this ominous development inadequately as 'a failure of the ego to deal with its own demands, to deal with anxiety aggravated by chaotic external circumstance'.