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The “Freudian left—whether it is defined as sexual politics, an amalgam of Marx and Freud, or howsoever—has attracted growing interest over the last two decades. Now Richard King presents the Party of Eros, presided over by Paul Goodman, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown, as the “new Transcendentalism” in American intellectual life. He argues that, like its forerunner of the 1830's and beyond and despite the disclaimers of its practitioners, the root impulse of the Party of Eros is indeed religious. Goodman, Marcuse, and Brown have moved far beyond the Freud from whom much of their inspiration is drawn, the Freud who so resolutely rejected the consolation that religiosity affords mankind. Although this thesis might well be true, King's book unfortunately does not sustain the burden of the argument.
The book does offer a sketch of American social thought in the twentieth century, with particular attention to the left and its confrontation with Freud. For the purposes of these three thinkers Freud had to be radicalized, a task accomplished, according to King, by Wilhelm Reich, whose work King describes in some detail. There follow three chapters which summarize the thought of Goodman, Marcuse, and Brown, emphasizing the psychological components. The chapter on Goodman is the best, since the author effectively links him with previous streams of American intellectual life: anarchism, the transplanted influences of Freud and Reich, Veblen, progressive education and John Dewey, and pragmatism.
These links are missing in the sections on Marcuse and Brown, although adequate summaries of their ideas are provided. Exemplifying the difficulties of the author here—or perhaps of the task itself—is that no immediate relationship to Reich is established. (Such difficulties exist, of course, only for those who believe that intellectual history should