Historian Lynn Hunt adapts Freud's notion of the “family romance” and of the origins of the social contract as developed in “Totem and Taboo” to explore “the ways that people collectively imagine—that is, think unconsciously about—the operation of power, and the ways in which this imagination shapes and is in turn shaped by political and social processes” (p. 8). Hunt's subject is the French Revolution as depicted in contemporaneous literature, art, family law, and political pornography. The result is a stimulating and psychologically sophisticated social history of 18th-century French political culture.