The Ordeal of Civility. Freud, Marx, Lévi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle for Modernity: By John Murray Cuddihy. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1974. 272 pp.

This work "examines the 'hidden transformations' of the everyday life problems of assimilating Jewry … into the very thought structures of Jewry's intellectual giants: Freud, Marx, and Lévi-Strauss." The process is viewed as a crucial dimension "of the threat posed by modernization to a traditionary subculture … the danger that being 'gentled' posed to an 'underdeveloped' subculture indigenous to the West" (p. 14). Freud dominates this provocative but affectionate book by an Irish-American Professor of Sociology at Hunter College. The author was "for a short time in the late nineteen-forties a patient of Dr. Theodore P. Wolfe," who had helped Wilhelm Reich settle in Forest Hills, New York in 1939. Cuddihy forthrightly tells it "like it is" without hiding behind modifying clauses. The effect, on this reader at least, is very much as I imagine the effect might have been for the first readers of Freud's unequivocal, deceptively simple discussion in print of universally guarded secrets: shock waves of defensive denial mixed with admiration and the suspicion that there is too much to think about and decide from a single reading. With time, Cuddihy's fellow sociologists of knowledge will determine whether he has duplicated for the seemingly trivial "Protestant Etiquette" (described here as the subculture's actual experiencing of Weber's Protestant Ethic) Freud's feat of extracting meaning from the seeming trivia of parapraxis (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life).