This analysis of leader-love offers no explanation of why the lust for transcendence tends to fixate on a single person, rather than, say, on an idea. Nor is it clear, in Freud's account, why some historical moments are more prone to such intoxications than others. Edmundson acknowledges these shortcomings - Freud, he admits, is no historicist. However, it is one thing to say fascism and assorted fundamentalisms answer to existing human temptations, and quite another to say that the adulation of the tyrannised for their tyrants is somehow inevitable. Rather, fascism and fundamentalism are where "humanity will go without potent efforts of resistance".
The moral of Moses and Monotheism, which was finally published just a few months before Freud died in London in September 1939, is that such resistance is possible: it is what we call "civilisation". Moses, the "hero of civilisation", renounces pleasure and desire in the name of something greater and teaches others to do the same.
Authority figures. With religious fundamentalism riding high, with the cries to support the President because he is the President, we need to guard against the temptations of surrendering ourselves. Democracy does require self-control.