This resembles nothing so much as the crackpot work of Immanuel Velikovsky, who like Sagan began as a psychoanalyst, then let his suppositions run amok. Woe to anyone who comes to cosmology through Velikovsky, and woe to anyone who comes to classical Athens through Sagan. He is neither a classicist, nor an historian, nor a political philosopher, and yet he claims insights that specialists in all three fields have missed. Sagan’s treatment of Plato and Aristotle is superficial, his view of democracy sentimental and reductionist. He begins with a questionable hypothesis, then arranges his material to support it. The Honey and the Hemlock smells all the way through.

One of the great insights of psychoanalytic theory, writes Sagan, is the developmental view that the psyche progresses in highly differentiated stages toward maturity and health. But, like Velikovsky’s thesis of planetary comets, shifting poles, and raining hydrocarbons, psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience, since there is no way to test it without relying on its own bogus assumptions.

From a wobbly platform of unfounded assumptions, then, Sagan takes a leap toward the nonsensical. He attributes to society a collective psyche, the ‘normal’ development of which ‘progresses’ through various stages. The purpose of History, Sagan claims, is to improve the mental health of society. Society is sick because it is paranoid. The term paranoia captures for Sagan all manner of social tensions and political malfunctions (here he dramatically misunderstands Hofstadter’s “paranoid style”). The process by which society overcomes 'neurosis' and 'psychopathology'—the bogey paranoia—is democratization (p. 65).

Sagan’s failure is threefold. First, in translating psychological concepts into sociology: there is no collective mind, ill or otherwise. Second, the teleological view of history, the belief that history has a purpose and a goal and so inevitably will arrive at a foregone conclusion, is a form of superstitious wish-fulfillment. Third, the idea that democracy is a cure for socio-psychological illness is buncombe.

If crackpottery is for you a form of entertainment, then you might enjoy The Honey and Hemlock. If you skip it, though, you will not have missed anything. ( )