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.

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

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.

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.

A biography of the greatest musical mind in Western history

Mozart's unshakable hold on the public's consciousness can only be strengthened by historian and biographer Peter Gay's concise and deft look at the genius's life. Mozart traces the development of the man whose life was a whirlwind of achievement, and the composer who pushed every instrument to its limit and every genre of classical music into new realms.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 renowned scholar's reflections on the romantic period, its disparate participants, and our unacknowledged debt to them

With his usual wit and lan, 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 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.

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.

A concise, pointed historical inquiry into Freud's atheism and Jewish cultural identity and their role in his development of psychoanalysis.-Library Journal A lucid, occasionally provocative close-up of Freud-as-nonbeliever, enhanced by Gay's suave, broadly allusive handling of the historical and theological contexts.-Kirkus Reviews In this valuable essay, Gay . . . brings great sensitivity and insight to a debate that still persists in some quarters.-Publishers Weekly Freud . . . would have enjoyed Peter Gay's book.-John C. Marshall, New York Times Book Review Freud himself asked why psychoanalysis had to be created by a 'completely godless Jew.' Gay elegantly and convincingly answers his question.-Choice It is an important and welcome contribution to the vast literature that already exists on Freud and the movement that he founded.-Lee Dembart, Los Angeles Times Published in association with the Hebrew Union College Press

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.

Peter Gay explores the shocking modernist rebellion that, beginning in the 1840s, transformed art, literature, music, and film. Modernism presents a thrilling pageant of heretics that includes Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, D. W. Griffiths, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Walter Gropius, Arnold Schoenberg, and (of course ) Andy Warhol.

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

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 Gay In 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.