Balbus conceptualizes modernity as a manic cultural defense against mourning the very losses it mandates and as a source of reparative movements of mourning that challenge its contemporary configuration. This argument allows Balbus to transcend the tired debate between those scholars for whom modernity is an unambiguous emancipation and those for whom modernity is entirely bereft of emancipatory possibilities. Mourning and Modernity thus renews the tradition of critical cultural psychoanalysis that includes the works of Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Christopher Lasch, and Dorothy Dinnerstein, and will be particularly provocative to readers who are familiar with that tradition as well as anyone who is interested in the intersection of psychoanalysis and social or political theory.