ABSTRACT

The phenomenon of guilt evasion cannot be adequately comprehended exclusively from the standpoint of the psychology of the individual. To attempt to do so would entail a failure of the sociological imagination which seeks to reveal the degree to which private troubles are grounded in public issues. But economic and sociocultural forces create conditions that may either encourage or discourage conscience and responsibility. Anthony Giddens’s critique of evolutionary or modernisation theory rests on the premise that Western industrialism appears at the apex “since it has undeniably unleashed a material productivity vastly greater than that of other societies which have preceded it in history”. For Sigmund Freud, the essential fact about the human mind and about human nature is the fact of conflict. In history, Eli Sagan traces a pattern of social development in which the anxiety and aggression occasioned by the break-up of tribal and kinship-based social organisation motivates varying forms of defensive tyranny.