The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity

John Murray Cuddihy examines how Jewish intellectuals like Freud, Marx, and Levi-Strauss grappled with the demands of modern secular civility. The book argues that their groundbreaking theories were shaped by a struggle to reconcile Jewish particularism with Enlightenment universalism. Cuddihy contends that the 'ordeal of civility' — the pressure to assimilate into Western bourgeois norms — drove much of their intellectual work.