Three people stand out as
having contributed more than any others to
revolutionaizing ideas of human nature and human
social life in the nineteenth and early twentieth
century: Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.
Each of them started out in a feild of study that was
to lay the foundations for a range of new scientific
disciplines, and through so doing, they radically
changed ideas of what it is to be human.
Both Marxist social theory
and Freudian psychology claim to provide deep
insights into the nature of religious belief, but in
fact, all three shared a fundamentally materialist
approach. The Marxist social theory sought to explain
the origin and development of religion in economic
and political life, while Freudian psychology focused
upon the role of the family and of unconcious mental
forces.
This book provides an
accessible introduction to these ideas. It shows how
Marxism and psychoanalysis can cast light upon major
currents of religious thinking from stone age times
through to the modern world.
Topics covered include the
religious beliefs of hunter-gathers, shamanism,
goddess worship in Neolithic times, religion and
ecology, religion and the origin of the State, Jesus
as magician or social revoluntionary, the psychology
and politics of celibacy and mythico-religious
dimensions of modern physics.
Table
of Contents
Scott Mann has taught
philosophy and social theory at the universities of
Sussex, Sydney and Western Sydney. He was a lecturer
and director of the Center for Liberal and General
Studies at the University of New South Wales, and is
currently teaching in the University of Western
Sydney. His previous book was Psychanalysis
and Society: An Introduction.
400 pages, bibliography,
index
Paperback ISBN: 1-55164-126-7 $24.99
Hardcover ISBN: 1-55164-127-5 $53.99
January 1999
