Before The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker was already attempting an insanely motivated journey to provide a unified account of human behaviour.

In The Structure of Evil, first published in 1968, he moves through Rousseau, Marx, Freud, Kierkegaard and the social sciences to ask why modern knowledge has proved so poor at producing humane societies. His answer is that evil grows from alienation, coercive institutions and systems that suppress people’s capacity to create meaning and act upon the world.

This is earlier, more overtly political Becker than the thinker most readers know from his writing on mortality. The synthesis is ambitious, argumentative and occasionally unruly, but that excess is part of its interest: Becker refuses the fantasy of a morally neutral system, and insists that any serious study of humanity must ask what kinds of lives and institutions permit human flourishing. Best for readers interested in existential psychology, Marx, psychoanalysis and the strange twentieth-century dream of a single science capable of explaining us to ourselves.

Free Press paperback, 1976, second printing. Good condition with light cover rubbing, edge wear and minor creasing.