The Cultivation of Hatred

By Peter Gay

Book Overview

Gay's search through middle-class Victorian culture, illuminated by lively portraits of such daunting figures as Bismarck, Darwin and his acolytes, George Eliot, and the great satirists Daumier and Wilhelm Busch, covers a vast terrain: the relations between men and women, wit, demagoguery, and much more. We discover the multiple ways in which the nineteenth century at once restrained aggressive behavior and licensed it. Aggression split the social universe into insiders and outsiders. "By gathering up communities of insiders," Professor Gay writes, the Victorians "discovered--only too often invented--a world of strangers beyond the pale, of individuals and classes, races and nations it was perfectly proper to debate, patronize, ridicule, bully, exploit, or exterminate." The aggressions so channeled or bottled could not be contained forever. Ultimately, they exploded in the First World War.?

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393033988
• ISBN13: 9780393033984
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 685 Pages
• Weight: 2.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

The Highlight of the Five Volume Set (thus far...)

[...] 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...