Peter Gay 14135
The cultivation of hatred: the Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud Volume III
W.W. Norton & Company, 1993. Linnen band met stofomslag. Pp: 685. "War," exclaimed Thomas Mann as the European powder keg exploded in 1914, "is purification, liberation, and an enormous hope." His was not the only voice edged with eagerness for battle. For nearly a hundred years, aggression had lurked beneath the surface of bourgeois culture, emerging occasionally to split the social order into insiders and outsiders. The Victorians, like members of other cultures, gave themselves permission to ridicule, bully, patronize, and exploit individuals and classes, races and nations they deemed to be inferior. But they also sought civilized rationales for their conduct, whether in the hunt for profits from new commercial ventures or for power in the political arena or for dominance over new movements that were bringing women out from domesticity.But that is only part of the story. What makes Peter Gay's Victorian bourgeois so fascinating is that they debated everything - quite aggressively. While majorities clung to the death penalty or the right to mete out corporal punishment, an increasingly vocal minority attacked these time-honored forms of aggression and denounced them as pathological. While many found it convenient to manipulate evolutionary theories in order to justify aggressive conduct at home and abroad, others, including Darwin's most authoritative interpreter, Thomas H. Huxley, argued the other side of the coin. Everything from domestic arrangements to women's rights, higher education, the nature of humor, and the limits of violence in sports was open to discussion.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 come into a new perspective. That self-appointed guardian of righteousness, Theodore Roosevelt, appears as the incarnation of bourgeois aggression at work in his lust for competition, fashionable racial attitudes, and manliness. Yet be stands at the same time as an advocate for transforming aggression into an instrument of democratic politics. Equally nuanced is Peter Gay's portrait of Otto von Bismarck: the savage battler against reform who was also a cool diplomat, ready to use violence when necessary and to oppose it when possible.In pursuing the great Victorian debate over aggression, Peter Gay brings new light to familiar themes, and introduces themes 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 the enterprise of winning the great battles against nature. In revealing the interplay between aggression, its employment and its control, and historical change, Peter Gay boldly advances themes first adumbrated by Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, but with a wealth of historical detail that makes for a remarkably fresh portrait of the Victorian age. show less. ISBN: 9780393033984. Cond./Kwaliteit: Goed.