For the 75th anniversary; a new edition of the seminal work with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Menand.Civilization and Its Discontents may be Sigmund Freud's best-known work. Originally published in 1930; it seeks to answer ultimate questions: What influences led to the creation of civilization? How did it come to be? What determines its course? In this seminal volume of twentieth-century thought; Freud elucidates the contest between aggression; indeed the death drive; and its adversary eros. He speaks to issues of human creativity and fulfillment; the place of beauty in culture; and the effects of repression. Louis Menand; author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club; contributor to The New Yorker; and professor of English at Harvard University; reflects on the importance of this work in intellectual thought and why it has become such a landmark book for the history of ideas. Not available in hardcover for decades; this beautifully rendered anniversary edition will be a welcome addition to readers' shelves.
#669704 in Books James L Roark 1978-11-17Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 7.70 x .90 x 5.00l; .70 #File Name: 0393009017288 pagesMasters Without Slaves
Review
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Just amazingBy Percy DovetonsilsAs a long time amateur student of the Civil War; having visited at least once all major battlefields and read a great many CW books since 1957 when my interest began. I have been searching to expand my reading to Reconstruction and beyond in the Olde Confederacy. This book filled my desire. Far from the romantic version of post Civil War South as in Gone With The Wind; the author has researched and compiled actual data as well as stories of how former masters coped with the loss of their slaves. Few handled the situation well; they had no training on how to operate a business in a free labor market. Some fled the South to other parts of America or Europe. Some fled to countries where they could legally buy slaves at that time; some committed suicide. Planters lost sons to the battlefield as the Grim Reaper harvested from all social classes. Planters lost crops; lost farms; lost the market. It was a very heavy price to pay for their attempt to keep slavery intact. In this book you will feel their despair and anguish.1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Masters without SlavesBy Mary Collins LandinThis book is very interesting; a much overlooked aspect of the end of the War and its legacy. What to do with freed slaves; since the federal government who freed them would not care for them. It is how Southerners coped with the problem in the immediate years after the War and reconstruction. Came on time in good condition.4 of 8 people found the following review helpful. Making freed people slavesBy Tony ThomasTo one degree or another; the slaveholders shared rule in the USA with the commercial capitalists until they were defeated in the Civil War. This book discusses their ideological and economic transformation at the end of the civil war and the beginning of Reconstruction.They believed that slavery was absolutely necessary to govern African Americans and to produce cotton and the other crops that underlied their wealth. They believed in the inferiority of African Americans and had no taste for free or freed labor. As a class they were destroyed. Many left the United States for Brazil and Cuba where African slavery still persisted. Others retreated into middle class and working class occupations; bereft of their former power. A significant minority adjusted to the new order and attempted to recast Southern agriculture on a basis that was formally free labor; but sought to achieve the same power as slavery. What comes through in this book was that the fundamental problem of Southern agriculture under American capitalism until mechaniziation came after World War II was labor shortage and the demands of first the slave owners and later the capitalist plantation owners to keep the workers and farmers who tilled the land; Black and white; from reaping the wealth. By the end of the 19th century; when most of the former slave owners had either been eliminated or amalgamated with North Industrial capital; the "New South" arose with Jim Crow violence; apartheid; and denial of democracy; the create a permanent Black labor force for Southern Agriculture without the rights and power of free men.
