A compilation of readings in German by Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Freidrich Nietzsche, with notes in English.

The world today is witnessing the terminal breakup of the great materialist belief systems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that so powerfully shaped the secular modern mind. No metaphor better encapsulates that breakup of the visionary theories and credos of nature, man, and society advanced by Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud than The Black Box. Each of the materialist faiths generated by modernity's famous quartet of founders contained an unknown chamber of surprises, a black box that its author could not, or did not see into. Today the black boxes stand open. First, the intricate cell of life, which the crude optics of Darwin's time could not penetrate, is indisputably a structure designed by intelligence. Second, the hidden component of mass killing that proved organic to Marxist revolutionary regimes. Third, the propensity of Nietzsche's bold vision of trans-moral overmen to produce, not the aesthetic ideal, but cold totalitarian monsters. Fourth, the widespread subversion of individual moral behavior legitimized by the deluded Freudian assertion of the primacy of subconscious drives over the rational mind. In the early twenty-first century, our civilization looks back upon the tragic legacy of materialism: a worldview that declared God to be a human invention, the galaxies and life on Earth cosmic accidents, and morality a factor of need and situation in an aimless universe. God substitutes emerged to fill the void. Religion-hostile National Socialist and Communist party regimes assumed in the twentieth century higher moral authority to kill their unwanted subjects and alien victims on a scale unprecedented in modern history. The stories of this book dramatize the life-crises of five acolytes of the famous four gospels of materialism that so powerfully shaped the violent twentieth century world, along with a sixth who returned on the eve of the millennium for a second look. In these stories, irony and humor could not be avoided.

Profound insights into Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud from the “prolific and eclectic” social theorist and bestselling author of Escape from Freedom (The Washington Post). According to renowned psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, three people shaped the essential character of the twentieth century: Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. While the first two figures had a great physical and political impact on the world, Fromm believes that Freud had an even deeper impact, because he changed how we think about ourselves. Beyond the Chains of Illusion is one of Fromm’s most autobiographical works, as Fromm not only comments on the ideas of Freud and Marx, but also crystallizes his own theories on social character and unconscious values. The book brilliantly summarizes Fromm’s ideas on how culture and society shape our behavior. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Erich Fromm including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

This long-overdue translation brings to the English-speaking world the work that set the tone for the Post-structuralist reading of Nietzsche.

This book revisits Paul Ricoeur's classification of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud as the “masters of suspicion”, and provides a thought-provoking critique for critical religious studies scholars, as well as anyone working in critical theory more broadly. Whereas Ricoeur saw suspicion as a mode of interpretation, Andrew Dole argues that the method common to his “masters” is better understood as a mode of explanation. Dole replaces Ricoeur's hermeneutics of suspicion with suspicious explanation, which claims the existence of hidden phenomena that are bad in some recognizable way. Each of the masters, Dole argues, offered a distinct kind of suspicious explanation. Reconstructing Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in this way brings their work into conversation with conspiracy theories, which are themselves a type of suspicious explanation. Dole argues that conspiracy theories and other types of suspicious explanation are “cognitively ensnaring”, to borrow a term from Pascal Boyer. If they are true they are importantly true, but their truth or falsity can be very difficult to ascertain.