Address at Oregon Bar Association annual meeting

The author's main premise is that all people and civilizations are unhappy because they are not honest with themselves. The book was written near the end of the nineteenth century when relations between Austria, Hungary and Germany were becoming unsettled. Nordau was a Hungarian by birth and also Jewish. For a while, he denied his faith but became a Zionist after the Dreyfus Affair, which revealed apparently universal anti-semitism.