biological descent, Freudianism came in very handy indeed. Besides trying to reconcile individual egoisms with a common interest by means of formal checks and balances, the state undertook, increasingly, to cure individual souls. This was not a new development (as Foucault tried to show, in too many words), but it gained a great deal of support from the psychoanalytic revolution. The Explicitly Therapeutic State—one that dispensed spiritual welfare along with material entitlements—was born at about the same time as its two ugly cousins: Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and Stalin’s “fundamentally” socialist state free from “class antagonism.” One of the main reasons why Marxism and Freudianism could compete with nationalism was that they, too, endorsed universal Mercurianism even as they condemned it. Freud stood Nietzsche on his head by suggesting the possibility of a well-functioning society of well-adjusted supermen: individuals who, with some help from Freud and friends, could defeat their own strangeness by taking charge of it. It was not a society of slaves or even of Weber’s “specialists without spirit”: it was a world of “freedom as perceived necessity.” As for Marx, not only was communism the only natural offspring, conceived in sin and born in suffering, of capitalism’s Prometheus Unbound; it was the ultimate bourgeois wish fulfillment—Nietzsche’s and Weber’s worst nightmare, the spirit of capitalism without capitalism. It was industriousness as a way of life, eternal work for its own sake. What Marx stood on its head was the traditional Apollonian concept of punishment and reward. Paradise became a place of ceaseless, spontaneous, unforced labor. 60 Like nationalism (and, indeed, Christianity, which combined the Old and New Testaments), Marxism and Freudianism were greatly strengthened by the creative power of a moral and aesthetic dualism. Marxist regimes could speak the language of prelapsarian nostalgia, romantic rebellion, and eternal life, while also insisting on rigid materialism and economic determinism. In the same way, the Western postindustrial states could draw on Freudian concepts to prescribe— in varying proportions—both civilization and its discontents. On the one hand, instincts were all-powerful and unrelenting (a bad thing because we are their prisoners, or a good thing because to know them is to master them and perhaps to enjoy the consequences). On the other hand, the possibility of treatment suggested the hope for a cure (a good thing because a rational individual could talk his way out of unhappiness, or a bad thing because licensed bureaucrats might mold our souls to fit a soulless civilization). Freudianism never became the official religion of any state, but Freud’s revelation of the true causes of human wretchedness did much to help the actually existing “welfare state”