On the first edition of the book (by the title Growth and Guilt):
"an outstanding book of vision and scholarship, stylishly written and skillfully translated from Italian. It is an ocean of western thought distilled into one volume."
——The Economist

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In A History of Arrogance, psychoanalyst Luigi Zoja explores one of the deepest roots of the contemporary crisis: the Western refusal to accept limits. Environmental collapse, climate anxiety, technological overreach and the ideology of endless growth are not only economic or political issues; they also reveal a psychic and cultural disorder.

Zoja traces this disorder back to the ancient Greek concept of hýbris: arrogance, excess, the human temptation to go beyond the measure assigned to us. In Greek culture, hýbris was always followed by némesis, the restoration of balance. Modernity, however, has progressively weakened this symbolic awareness. Western civilization has built its greatness on the transgression of limits — geographical, scientific, religious, political — but this same impulse has become dangerous in a world whose resources are finite.

Moving between mythology, psychoanalysis, philosophy and cultural history, Zoja examines emblematic figures such as Icarus, Phaethon, Prometheus, Adam and Eve, Dante’s Ulysses and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Each embodies a different form of excess: the desire to fly too high, to command uncontrollable forces, to possess forbidden knowledge, to cross every boundary. These myths, Zoja argues, still speak directly to the present.

Today, némesis no longer appears as divine punishment. It returns as ecological devastation, climate change, social inequality, compulsive consumption, anxiety, depression and loss of meaning. The Earth itself has become the limit that humanity can no longer ignore.

Zoja does not reject progress, science or freedom. Rather, he calls for a renewed culture of measure: the ability to recognize boundaries, accept mortality and reimagine development beyond the fantasy of infinite expansion. A History of Arrogance is a lucid and timely reflection on the psychological origins of our global crisis and on the urgent need to restore balance between human ambition and the limits of the world.

Luigi Zoja is an Italian psychoanalyst, essayist and internationally recognized intellectual. A former president of the International Association for Analytical Psychology, he has written extensively on myth, society, violence, fatherhood, paranoia, addiction and the psychological foundations of contemporary culture. His work combines Jungian depth psychology with a broad historical and anthropological perspective, making him one of the most original voices in European psychoanalytic thought.