In the 2010s, Mark Fisher asked why culture had effectively stagnated since the 1990s. Anthropologist J. D. Unwin had already answered his question 80 years earlier.

In Sex and Culture, Unwin shows that societies can only maintain creative energy as long as they severely curtail sexual freedom. Within one generation of a sexual revolution, that energy dissipates, and the society becomes culturally sterile and lapses into decline. In his exhaustive study, Unwin applies this rule to 80 cultures. There are no exceptions.

Sex and Culture has become a classic, and a generation later it was being cited in the US Congress as the sexual revolution was in full swing. Aldous Huxley called it “a work of the highest importance”, which is even truer today than in Huxley’s time. In this definitive edition of Unwin’s masterwork, evolutionary psychologist Edward Dutton provides the most substantial biography of Unwin to date, and explains the continuing relevance of his work.