Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis

Here is the final volume of Norman O. Brown's trilogy on civilization and its discontents, on humanity's long struggle to master its instincts and the perils that attend that denial of human nature. Following on his famous books Life Against Death and Love's Body, this collection of eleven essays brings Brown's thinking up to 1990 and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe.

Brown writes that "the prophetic tradition is an attempt to give direction to the social structure precipitated by the...