The Politics of the Soul

John Dickson is an adjunct research fellow at La Trobe University, Australia. He undertook postgraduate studies at Yale University and completed his PhD at La Trobe under the supervision of Professor John Carroll in 2014. It was titled "Strange Gods: The Crisis of Meaning After Nietzsche." He has since written several articles, including chapters in The Anthem Companion to Philip Rieff (2017) and Metaphysical Sociology: On the Work of John Carroll (2019). This is his first book.

PART I: Apocalypse 1. The Nietzsche Problem: Dangerous Knowledge 2. The Last Good Liberal: Max Weber’s Pessimistic Realism 3. The Grand Hotel Abyss: Georg Lukács and the Leap of Faith 4. The Reactionary: T.S. Eliot and the Escape from The Waste Land 5. The Last Just Cause: The Auden Generation and the Spanish Civil War PART II: The Psychoanalytic Movement 6. The Destroyer of Illusions: Sigmund Freud 7. Strange Gods: C.G. Jung and the Mystic Circus PART III: The Humanist Reconstruction 8. The Need for Roots: George Orwell and Hannah Arendt; Concluding Remarks: Thinking What We Are Doing