The Reversal of Commitment

Reif: For Marx and for Nietzsche, the present community is one that needs to be overthrown in order for humanity to reach its full potential. In Freud, Reif's intellectual source and himself an admirer of Rousseau, the notion of the community as a good is also placed under pressure. A charitable reading of his cultural theory allows that the repressed community we have is at best merely preferable to the bloodthirsty chaos that the alternative offers.