The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 3: The Cultivation of Hatred

The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud #3

by Peter Gay

Middle-class Victorian culture is explored in a study that discusses a society divided by restraints and aggressions that ultimately exploded in World War I. By the author of A LIfe for Our Time.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, European History, Politics, Political Science

752 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1993

About the author

Peter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). He received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968); and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).
Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, via Cuba, to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University's History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.
Gay was the interim editor of The American Scholar after the death of Hiram Haydn in 1973 and served on that magazine's editorial board for many years. Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".

Reviews

[Michael Perkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

The development and cruel application of Social Darwinism in the late 19th century, that carried over into the Prussian culture, that would express itself in two world wars and the development of the eugenics movement.

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Overview....

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-x...

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Eugenics movement....

https://listverse.com/2014/02/05/10-t...

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And, unfortunately, "race science" has reared its ugly head again.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018...

[Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This five volume history of the victorian bourgeois follows a freudian schematic: the first volume dealt with love, the second with sex, and this volume with agression.

This book was my favorite of the three I've read so far. Gay picks apart the Victorian penchant for cloaked agression with admirable scholastic fortitude. His discussion of Foucault's theory of prisons is a high light for this entire five volume set.

His critique of what he calls the "social control" theorists is that they fail to take into account the ability of the powerful to delude themselves into thinking they are doing the right thing, even when they are most assuredly not.

Why stop here? Only two more volumes to go...

[Justin Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delve into the period that produced such powerful one-liners as "survival of the fittest", and much of what prevails as racist ideology. This book is an investigation of the 19th century's tendancy to cloak and justify raw brutalism and violence towards non-europeans, women, and the disadvantaged through it's most civilized institutions. The origins of the holocaust are all right here.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

An unfortunate merger of the author’s expertise in Freud and modern German political culture ?