The Greeks and the Irrational
This chapter focuses on E.R. Dodds’s famous book The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), in which he has largely moved on to a more psychologically inflected anthropology. Indeed, in the preface, Dodds warns that the book is not ‘a history of Greek religion or even of Greek religious ideas or feelings’. A famous—one might say notorious—argument in The Greeks and the Irrational is that the archaic Greek’s supposed anxieties and sense of guilt were a product of the tensions between fathers and sons created by the loosening of the old solidarity of the family which imposed absolute obedience. This is an argument that extends a psychological proposition about sons’ feelings for fathers to a proposition about society, thus an instance of the bridge between social psychology and social anthropology.