The Cultivation of Hatred

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W. W. Norton & Company, 1993 - 685 pages
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.

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Contents

Introduction
3
ONE Alibis
35
TWO Pathologies
128
THREE Demagogues and Democrats
213
FOUR The Powerful Weaker Sex
288
FIVE The Bite of Wit
368
SIX Uncertain Mastery
424
Neuroses
491
EPILOGUE August 4 1914
514
Copyright

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About the author (1993)

Peter Gay (1923—2015) was the author of more than twenty-five books, including the National Book Award winner The Enlightenment, the best-selling Weimar Culture, and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time.

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