Peter Gay – författare

In the twentieth century, however, the Enlightenment has often been judged harshly for its apparently simplistic optimism. Now a master historian goes back to the sources to give a fully rounded account of its true accomplishments.

First published in 1968, Weimar Culture is one of the masterworks of Peter Gay's distinguished career. A study of German culture between the two wars, the book brilliantly traces the rise of the artistic, literary, and musical culture that bloomed ever so briefly in the 1920s amid the chaos of Germany's tenuous post-World War I democracy, and crashed violently in the wake of Hitler's rise to power. Despite the ephemeral nature of the Weimar democracy, the influence of its culture was profound and far-reaching, ushering in a modern sensibility in the arts that dominated Western culture for most of the twentieth century. Vivid and eminently readable, Weimar Culture is the finest introduction for the casual reader and historian alike.

In his most ambitious endeavour since Freud, acclaimed cultural historian Peter Gay traces and explores the rise of Modernism in the arts, the cultural movement that heralded and shaped the modern world, dominating western high culture for over a century. He traces the revolutionary path of modernism from its Parisian origins to its emergence as the dominant cultural movement in world capitals such as Berlin and New York, presenting along the way a thrilling pageant of hereitcs that includes Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, Walter Gropius and Any Warhol. The result is a work unique in its breadth and brilliance.Lavishly illustrated, Modernism is a superb achievement by one of our greatest historians.

Freudian thought permeates virtually every aspect of 20th century life. To understand Freud is to explore not only his scientific papers but also his vivid writings on art, literature, politics, religion and culture. The Freud Reader is the first single-volume work to bring together in accessible form Freud's ideas as a scientist, humanist, doctor and philosopher. It contains fifty-one key texts, spanning Freud's entire career from early case histories through his work on dreams, essays on sexuality, and on to his late writings, including Civilisation and Its Discontents.Peter Gay, a leading scholar of Freud, has put together this selection to provide a full portrait of Freud's thought. He has also written clear introductions to the selected texts and a general introduction which places the man and his work in the context of his time and culture.

Is psychoanalysis a legitimate tool for helping us understand the past? Many traditional historians have answered with an emphatic no, greeting the introduction of Freud into historical study with responses ranging from condescending skepticism to outrage. Now Peter Gay, one of America's leading historians, builds an eloquent case for "history informed by psychoanalysis" and offers an impressive rebuttal to the charges of the profession'santi-Freudians.In this book, Gay takes on the opposition's arguments, defending psychoanalysis as a discipline that can enhance social, economic, and literary studies. No mere polemic, Freud forHistorians is a thoughtful and detailed contribution to a major intellectual debate.

“Why did none of the devout create psychoanalysis?  Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?” Freud once asked.  In this book, the eminent historian and Freud scholar Peter Gay enters the long-running controversy about the relationship between religion and psychoanalysis.  Gay takes seriously Freud’s claim that he was an atheist and argues that atheism was an essential stance for the making of psychoanalysis.  He contends, in fact, that Judaism was not essential and that psychoanalysis is not a “Jewish science,” as both anti-Semites and ardent Freudians have often assumed.  Peter Gay begins by discussing why psychoanalysis could only have been conceived by an atheist.  According to him, Freud saw science and religion as absolutely at odds with each other.  While some theologians and analysts have attempted to forge an alliance between psychoanalytic and religious positions, these attempts at accommodation have failed and must fail.  Psychoanalysis is not a religion, and the two comprise wholly incompatible styles of thinking about the world.  Gay then deals with the question of whether Freud’s Jewish background contributed to the creation of psychoanalysis and describes Freud’s secular Judaism: while Freud was very much aware of his Jewishness and was in fact proud of it, this had nothing to do with the making of psychoanalysis itself.  True, Freud himself saw a possible link between his Jewishness and his daring: as a Jew he was treated ass an outsider and therefore, he thought, could approach delicate topics such as sexuality more boldly than he would have if he had been thoroughly lodged on the inside.  However, Gay maintains that this is at best a weak statement.Writing with his customary wit and charm, Gay not only discusses Freud’s life and personality as they affected his ideas on religion but also compares Freud’s thoughts on religion to those of William James, Charles Darwin, Paul Tillich, and a host of Enlightenment figures.  The result is a book that will richly reward ever reader.Published in association with Hebrew Union College Press

“As every biographer of Freud must ruefully acknowledge, Freud, that great unriddler of mysteries, left behind some intriguing private mysteries of his own.  It was because I hoped to solve some of these mysteries that the stratagem of finding my way to Freud by indirections commended itself to me.” –Peter GayIn this book, the eminent cultural historian and Freud scholar Peter Gay presents a series of essays in which he tries to “reduce the blank spots on the map we now have of Freud’s mind.”  Engaging as well as illuminating, the essays range from reflections on Freud and Shakespeare to Gay’s controversial spoof review of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.The book begins with “Freud and the Man from Stratford,” in which Gay describes Freud’s fascination with the theory that the Earl of Oxford was the real author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare and speculates on the reasons for Freud’s belief.  “Six Names in Search of an interpretation” considers Freud’s choices of names for his six children and what they revealed about his Jewishness, his love of science, and his ambivalent feelings toward his father.  “Freud on Freedom” deals with the issue of determinism and free will in Freud’s work.  “Reading Freud through Freud’s Reading” analyzes ten “good” books Freud identified in response to a questionnaire.  The second half of the book, entitled “Entertainments,” includes an essay on “Serious Jests” that cites some vintage Jewish jokes frequently recounted by Freud and points out how these chestnuts illustrate not only psychoanalytic concepts but the anti-Semitism that permeated Freud’s Vienna; the “review” of The Interpretation of Dreams, published in Harper’s in 1981; “A Gentile Science?” which is a “report” on the work of one Sigmund Oberhufer, a fictitious Austrian doctor said to have “invented” psychoanalysis; and “The Dog That Did Not Bark in the Night,” Gay’s account of the newly accessible correspondence between Freud and his sister-in-law Minna Bernays, who some writers claim was his lover.  The essays, some of them published for the first time or expanded from their original versions, are accompanied by informative introductions.

“Not only a memoir, it’s also a fierce reply to those who criticized German-Jewish assimilation and the tardiness of many families in leaving Germany” (Publishers Weekly).   In this poignant book, a renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated, anti-religious Jew in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1939—“the story,” says Peter Gay, “of a poisoning and how I dealt with it.” With his customary eloquence and analytic acumen, Gay describes his family, the life they led, and the reasons they did not emigrate sooner, and he explores his own ambivalent feelings—then and now—toward Germany its people.   Gay relates that the early years of the Nazi regime were relatively benign for his family, yet even before the events of 1938–39, culminating in Kristallnacht, they were convinced they must leave the country. Gay describes the bravery and ingenuity of his father in working out this difficult emigration process, the courage of the non-Jewish friends who helped his family during their last bitter months in Germany, and the family’s mounting panic as they witnessed the indifference of other countries to their plight and that of others like themselves. Gay’s account—marked by candor, modesty, and insight—adds an important and curiously neglected perspective to the history of German Jewry.   “Not a single paragraph is superfluous. His inquiry rivets without let up, powered by its unremitting candor.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review   “[An] eloquent memoir.” —The Wall Street Journal   “A moving testament to the agony the author experienced.” —Chicago Tribune    “[A] valuable chronicle of what life was like for those who lived through persecution and faced execution.” —Choice

A renowned scholar’s reflections on the romantic period, its disparate participants, and our unacknowledged debt to themWith his usual wit and élan, esteemed historian Peter Gay enters the contentious, long-standing debates over the romantic period. Here, in this concise and inviting volume, he reformulates the definition of romanticism and provides a fresh account of the immense achievements of romantic writers and artists in all media.  Gay’s scope is wide, his insights sharp. He takes on the recurring questions about how to interpret romantic figures and their works. Who qualifies to be a romantic? What ties together romantic figures who practice in different countries, employ different media, even live in different centuries? How is modernism indebted to romanticism, if at all?  Guiding readers through the history of the romantic movement across Britain, France, Germany, and Switzerland, Gay argues that the best way to conceptualize romanticism is to accept its complicated nature and acknowledge that there is no “single basket” to contain it. Gay conceives of romantics in “families,” whose individual members share fundamental values but retain unique qualities. He concludes by demonstrating that romanticism extends well into the twentieth century, where its deep and lasting impact may be measured in the work of writers such as T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

The eighteenth century Enlightenment marks the beginning of the modern age when the scientific method and belief in reason and progress came to hold sway over the Western world. In the twentieth century, however, the Enlightenment has often been judged harshly for its apparently simplistic optimism. Here a master historian goes back to the sources to give us both a more sophisticated and intriguing view of the philosophes, their world and their ideas.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT has long been the victim of uninformed or hostile criticisms. Even so respected a source as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines the Enlightenment as “shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for authority and tradition,” thus collecting in one sentence most of our current prejudices. In this provocative book—at once a scholarly study and a vigorous polemic—Peter Gay sets out to shatter old myths, to sort out illusion from reality, and to restore the men of the Enlightenment—Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot—to the esteem they deserve.         The nine related essays in The Party of Humanity fall into three divisions: three are on Voltaire, presenting the great philosophe as a tough-minded, realistic man of letters who tried to reshape his world, rather than as merely brittle and shallow wit. Then, three essays characterize the French Enlightenment as a whole, and seek for the unity underlying the diversity of tempers and attitudes among its leaders. The last three, which include Mr. Gay’s well-known critique of Carl Becker’s The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, are polemics against widely accepted views of the Enlightenment. The longest chapter here is a detailed examination of Rousseau, the philosopher, and of his reputation among his interpreters.         What all nine essays have in common, apart from their portrayal of the philosophes as serious and engage partisans of humanity, is that they are all essays in the “social history of ideas”; they all treat ideas as inseparable from the specific social and cultural setting from which they emerge and which they affect.

The Science of Freedom completes Peter Gay''s brilliant reinterpretation begun in The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism. In the present book, he describes the philosophes'' program and their views of society. His masterful appraisal opens a new range of insights into the Enlightenment''s critical method and its humane and libertarian vision.

The nine related essays in The Party of Humanity fall into three divisions: three are on Voltaire, presenting the great philosophe as a tough-minded, realistic man of letters who tried to reshape his world, rather than as a merely brittle and shallow wit. Then, three essays discuss the French Enlightenment as a whole and seek for the unity underlying the diversity of tempers and attitudes among its leaders. The last three, which include Mr. Gay's well-known critique of Carl Becker's The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, challenge some widely accepted views of the Enlightenment. The longest chapter here is a detailed examination of Rousseau and his reputation among his interpreters.What all nine essays have in common, apart from their portrayal of the philosophes as serious and engaged partisans of humanity, is that they are essays in the social history of ideas; they all treat ideas as inseparable from the specific social and cultural setting from which they emerge, and which they affect.

Peter Gay's most ambitious endeavor since Freud explores the shocking modernist rebellion that, beginning in the 1840s, transformed art, literature, music, and film with its assault on traditional forms. Beginning his epic study with Baudelaire, whose lurid poetry scandalized French stalwarts, Gay traces the revolutionary path of modernism from its Parisian origins to its emergence as the dominant cultural movement in world capitals such as Berlin and New York. A work unique in its breadth and brilliance, Modernism presents a thrilling pageant of heretics that includes (among others) Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, and D. W. Griffiths; James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot; Walter Gropius, Arnold Schoenberg, and (of course!) Andy Warhol. Finally, Gay examines the hostility of totalitarian regimes to modernist freedom and the role of Pop Art in sounding the death knell of a movement that dominated Western culture for 120 years. Lavishly illustrated, Modernism is a superlative achievement by one of our greatest historians.

What does an historian’s style reveal? In this original and lucid guide to the proper reading of Gibbon, Ranke, Macaulay, and Burckhardt—great historians who were also great stylists—Peter Gay demonstrates that, style is an invaluable clue to the historian's insight. Thus, for Peter Gay, style is the key to culture, and the “truth” of history—as it helps to define that culture—can only be fully understood through an objective and thorough analysis of all its elements.

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.

The Science of Freedom completes Peter Gay's brilliant reinterpretation begun in The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism. In the present book, he describes the philosophes' program and their views of society. His masterful appraisal opens a new range of insights into the Enlightenment's critical method and its humane and libertarian vision.

What to read from the vast output of Sigmund Freud has long been a puzzle. Freudian thought permeates virtually every aspect of twentieth-century life; to understand Freud is to explore not only his scientific papers—on the psycho-sexual theory of human development, his theory of the mind, and the basic techniques of psychoanalysis—but also his vivid writings on art, literature, religion, politics, and culture.The fifty-one texts in this volume range from Freud's dreams, to essays on sexuality, and on to his late writings, including Civilization and Its Discontents. Peter Gay, a leading scholar of Freud and his work, has carefully chosen these selections to provide a full portrait of Freud's thought. His clear introductions to the selections help guide the reader's journey through each work.Many of the selections are reproduced in full. All have been selected from the Standard Edition, the only English translation for which Freud gave approval both to the editorial plan and to specific renderings of key words and phrases.

At the very time that industrialists, inventors, statesmen, and natural scientists were conquering new objective worlds, Gay writes, "the secret life of the self had grown into a favorite and wholly serious indoor sport."Following the middle class's preoccupation with inwardness through its varied cultural expressions (such as fiction, art, history, and autobiography), Gay turns also to the letters and confessional diaries of both obscure and prominent men and women. These revealing documents help to round out a sparkling portrait of an age.

The Victorians in this richly peopled narrative maneuvered through decades marked by frequent shifts in taste, some seeking safety in traditional styles, others drawn to the avant-garde of artists, composers, and writers. Peter Gay's panoramic survey offers a fresh view of the ideas and sensibilities that dominated Victorian culture.

It explores an anxiety-provoking time when the boundaries between erotic expressiveness and reserve began to give way, changing the experience of love. "One of the major historical enterprises of the decade. . . . An enterprise requiring a daring and breadth of knowledge possessed by few other contemporary historians."—Gordon A. Craig, New York Review of Books "Gay's writing has an artist's feel for the flow and rhythms of language, and his extensive and exquisitely managed research is blended into a unified structure that consistently serves the author's purpose."—San Francisco Chronicle "The vicissitudes of the 'tender passion' in both the fiction and the real lives of the Victorians is an enthralling subject."—Anthony Storr, The Spectator

Education of the Senses draws on a vast array of primary sources to reexamine nineteenth-century sexual behavior, overturning a number of stereotypes, especially about women and sexuality.

An essential work for anyone who wishes to understand the social history of the nineteenth century, Schnitzler's Century is the culmination of Peter Gay's thirty-five years of scholarship on bourgeois culture and society. Using Arthur Schnitzler, the sexually emboldened Viennese playwright, as his master of ceremonies, Gay offers a brilliant reexamination of the hundred-year period that began with the defeat of Napoleon and concluded with the conflagration of 1914. This is a defining work by one of America's greatest historians.

Focusing on three literary masterpieces—Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853), Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (1901)—Peter Gay, a leading cultural historian, demonstrates that there is more than one way to read a novel.Typically, readers believe that fiction, especially the Realist novels that dominated Western culture for most of the nineteenth century and beyond, is based on historical truth and that great novels possess a documentary value. That trust, Gay brilliantly shows, is misplaced; novels take their own path to reality. Using Dickens, Flaubert, and Mann as his examples, Gay explores their world, their craftsmanship, and their minds. In the process, he discovers that all three share one overriding quality: a resentment and rage against the society that sustains the novel itself. Using their stylish writing as a form of revenge, they deal out savage reprisals, which have become part of our Western literary canon. A New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of 2002.

"A magisterial contribution to the history of ideas. A fresh, illuminating perspective on one of the pivotal figures of our time." —J. Anthony Lukas"[This] remarkable biography… briskly traces the story of Freud's life and education, deftly weaving the familiar narrative with a style that makes it seem fresh and lively." —Chicago Tribune

A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America by Peter Gay offers a brilliant exploration of how early New Englanders wrote their history and what that writing reveals about the Puritan mind. Drawing on figures from William Bradford and Cotton Mather to Jonathan Edwards, Gay shows how colonial historians sought to order the turbulence of settlement, theology, and politics into a providential narrative. At the heart of the book is the paradox that the Puritans, for all their obsession with recording God’s design in history, failed to develop the historical consciousness that was transforming Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Written originally as Jefferson Memorial Lectures, Gay’s study balances intellectual history with close readings of canonical Puritan texts. It traces the evolution of a historiography that began in heroic self-justification but descended into elegiac lamentations of decline. For Gay, this trajectory reveals both the grandeur and the limitations of the Puritan experiment: the effort to live within a providential frame of history that could not withstand the modernizing pressures of Enlightenment thought. A Loss of Mastery thus illuminates not only the Puritan worldview but also the larger problem of cultural adaptation in the New World.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.

A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America by Peter Gay offers a brilliant exploration of how early New Englanders wrote their history and what that writing reveals about the Puritan mind. Drawing on figures from William Bradford and Cotton Mather to Jonathan Edwards, Gay shows how colonial historians sought to order the turbulence of settlement, theology, and politics into a providential narrative. At the heart of the book is the paradox that the Puritans, for all their obsession with recording God’s design in history, failed to develop the historical consciousness that was transforming Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Written originally as Jefferson Memorial Lectures, Gay’s study balances intellectual history with close readings of canonical Puritan texts. It traces the evolution of a historiography that began in heroic self-justification but descended into elegiac lamentations of decline. For Gay, this trajectory reveals both the grandeur and the limitations of the Puritan experiment: the effort to live within a providential frame of history that could not withstand the modernizing pressures of Enlightenment thought. A Loss of Mastery thus illuminates not only the Puritan worldview but also the larger problem of cultural adaptation in the New World.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1966.