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The Freudian hypothesis of the death drive would explain the constant recurrence, in human history, of conflicts and wars. It considers as naïve the idea of a universal peace based on a naive Rousseauist anthropology which disregards human nature and the contribution of the death drive to life itself. The diametrically opposed figures of Erostratus, the first terrorist in history, and Alexander the Great, illustrate the diverse forms that this drive can take and the way in which human destructivity can both be condemned morally and sublimated or valued. The hypothesis remains no less disturbing and it even met with resistance from Freud himself who only arrived at it at the end of his clinical and theoretical research. It led to the breakdown of Freud’s relationship with some of his disciples, in particular, Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich, who became the fathers of “Freudo-Marxism. This article is based on a careful reading of their writings and of their correspondence with Freud, ma-king it possible to disentangle the knot of the doctrinal divergence between Freu-dian orthodoxy and Freudo-Marxism: the death drive.