The Founding Fathers were wise, as always, in their choice of words. In the Declaration of Independence they spoke of “the pursuit of happiness,” not happiness itself, as among man’s “unalienable rights.” Still, the sense of promise shimmers from the little phrase and is so ingrained in the American mind that we tend to feel surprised, and somewhat betrayed, whenever happiness fails to materialize.

This is one of the oldest and most persistent of questions: not only, How should I live, but how can I be happy? Certain ancients had a pretty dour answer. According to Sophocles, “Call no man happy until he is dead, for the dead are free from pain.” This is great poetry, but not exactly a formula for the carefree life. Happiness as mere freedom from pain, while certainly desirable, doesn’t seem quite commensurate with our particularly American notion of personal happiness, which is robust and affirmative. Sigmund Freud tackled the problem in his own astute and peculiar fashion. In his searching essay “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Freud puzzled over why the steady advance of human civilization has not made us happier as individuals. The book, first published in 1930, will soon be reissued on its 75th anniversary (W.W. Norton, 195 pages, $19.95), with an excellent new introduction by Louis Menand and a biographical after word by the historian Peter Gay.

To read this little book so many years after its first appearance is to be seized by vaguely conflicting emotions. First, we’ve all become so acclimated to Freud and his jargon – the pleasure principle, the Oedipus complex, the death-drive – that it’s hard to appreciate his true originality; we have the sense of raking over extinguished coals in a long-spent grate. His striking formulations read now like cliches and we, rather perversely – forgetting that he invented them – devalue him for leaning so insistently upon them.

Second, Freud’s invariable tendency to reduce every mental phenomenon to something else can grow tiresome, all the more so because reductionism has become such a prevailing intellectual strategy since his time. I’m not convinced that guilt, for example, has as its origin some primordial crime – the killing of the all-powerful father – but Freud, despite his debunking of religion, was wedded to this notion as solidly as any Christian theologian to the doctrine of Original Sin.

These are cavils, easily outweighed by the virtues of the book. For one thing, Freud is a truly elegant writer; his spare ironic style mirrors the supple configurations of his thought. As we read, we witness a restless and inquisitive intelligence materializing on the page. Add to that his penchant for mordant asides and witty apercus and you aren’t surprised to learn that, as Mr. Menand reminds us, Freud once remarked to Giovanni Papini, “Though I have the appearance of a scientist I was and am a poet and novelist.” Thus, when discussing his concept of “the narcissism of minor differences,” which seeks to explain why adjacent countries so often squabble with each other (as a way of reinforcing their own inner cohesion), he remarks, “In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts; but unfortunately all the massacres of the Jews in the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful and secure for their Christian fellows.” This sardonic note introduces a far more profound, and indeed scathing, judgment when he goes on to say, “When once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence.”

More importantly, however, it is Freud’s attempts to localize the very source of our discontent not in societal pressures as such but within the roots of our psyche that give his essay a piercing vibrancy that continues to disturb. We need civilization – indeed, it is indispensable to us – but civilization by its very nature thwarts and obstructs our individual desires. The effective impulse behind all civilization is erotic. Eros, “builder of cities,” as W.H. Auden put it, compels us to seek something outside ourselves; this desire to love and to be loved is what leads ineluctably to civilization.

Civilization requires the individual to sacrifice personal cravings for the larger good. But civilization, like the individual, is itself torn by internal conflicts between the erotic impulse – the pleasure principle – and the human propensity to aggression – the notorious (and nebulous) “death-drive.” Civilizations, too, can thus become neurotic, thwarted in their deepest drives. In our civilizing urge, there is something at once necessary and poisonous, Freud seems to argue, which we cannot escape.

Freud doesn’t seek out easy answers. One of the charms of his essay, in fact, is the hesitancy and near-diffidence with which he worries this fundamental puzzle. Moreover, the elegance of his analogy between the inner core of the psyche and the outer structures that it erects suggests a strange microcosmic view of human society reminiscent of certain medieval thinkers.

I couldn’t help being reminded of one of these as I read “Civilization and Its Discontents.” The 14th-century North African historian Ibn Khaldun, often called “the father of sociology,” also elaborated a tragic vision of society in which he sought to explicate the decline and fall of successive dynasties. For him, as for Freud, the essential conflict lay between the nomadic and the settled: the individualistic and self-sufficient, on the one hand, and the collective and mutually dependent, on the other. Human culture, he argued, was crucial for man, not merely in order to survive but to realize himself fully as a human being. Yet in the civilizing impulse which led people to found cities and states, the germ of their downfall was already sown. Following Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun knew man to be a “political animal,” that is, a creature who achieved his highest potential in association with his fellows. This very need for association, however, betrayed a fatal weakness that would lead eventually to societal collapse; or, as he more picturesquely put it, whenever the doctor and the lawyer appear in a culture, decline is inevitable.

The Arab thinker envisaged human society as subject to invariable laws by means of which cultures rose and fell. Freud, who probably knew nothing of Ibn Khaldun, saw similar laws operating within us. But both thinkers, however different, had themselves witnessed the effects of war and large-scale destruction – Ibn Khaldun even served as an envoy to Tamburlaine (who offered him a job) – and both believed that history constituted a tragic mechanism. Freud died in 1939, forced out of Vienna by the Anschluss. Had he lived a few years longer he would have seen all his worst premonitions confirmed.