The unabridged audiobook edition was released on 12 June 2018, by Random House Audio. The book was first published in 1999 by Routledge, with the hardcover edition following in 2002.
Skinner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Voltaire, and Ludwig Wittgenstein among many others. It includes theories of religion and God, natural origin of modern culture, and the bibliography includes Dante Alighieri, Hannah Arendt, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Northrop Frye, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Brothers Grimm, Stephen Hawking, Laozi, Konrad Lorenz, Alexander Luria, John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Piaget, B. Īccording to Craig Lambert, writing in Harvard Magazine, the book is influenced by Jung's archetypal ideas about the collective unconscious and evolutionary psychology. The prospect of steady employment was attractive as he had two children by then, and so he decided to accept an offer from the University of Toronto in 1998. He initially intended to use it in an application for academic tenure at Harvard, but found that he was not emotionally up to the task, nor was he "in the position to make the strongest case for myself". Peterson began to write Maps of Meaning in the mid-1980s, and used text from it (then titled as The Gods of War) during his classes teaching as an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University. Finding himself unsatisfied and falling into a depression, he discovered inspiration in the ideas of Carl Jung and decided to pursue psychology.
During adolescence and early adulthood he tried finding the answer to "the general social and political insanity and evil of the world" (from Cold War to totalitarianism) and for a short period of time he embraced socialism and political science. The responses to his questions about the literal truth of Biblical stories seemed ignorant, causing him to lose interest in attending church. In it, he briefly reflects on his childhood and on being raised in a Christian family.
Peterson wrote the book for more than 13 years in an attempt to "explain the meaning of history".