Peter Gay

The Cultivation of Hatred

"Compendious, learned, stylishly argued." —George Steiner, The New Yorker

"Peter Gay makes comprehensible, as no other recent history I have read does, how a seemingly remote assassination in Sarajevo could tip over an entire civilization. . . [His] writings make the past make emotional sense." —Richard Sennett, Los Angeles Times Book Review

For nearly a hundred years, aggression lurked beneath the surface of bourgeois culture, emerging occasionally to split the social order into insiders and outsiders. The Victorians gave themselves permission to ridicule, bully, patronize, and exploit individuals and classes, races and nations that they deemed inferior. But they sought civilized rationales for their conduct, whether in the hunt for profits from new commercial ventures, for power in the political arena, or for dominance over new movements that were bringing women out from domesticity.

With the same sweep and authority that marked his best-selling Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay here takes us on a remarkable journey through an age of belief-shaking new ideas, inventions, discoveries. Figures bigger than life—Theodore Roosevelt, Otto von Bismarck, George Sand, Emile Zola, Sade, Nietzsche, and many others—come into a new perspective. In pursuing the great Victorian debate over aggression, Peter Gay brings new light to familiar themes, and introduces subjects that historians of the nineteenth century have so far evaded: the shifting relations of male to female writers, the uses of humor as a form of aggression, and constructive possibilities of aggression in winning the great battles against nature.