Written in the decade before Freud s death, Civilization and Its Discontents may be his most famous and most brilliant work. It has been praised, dissected, lambasted, interpreted, and reinterpreted. Originally published in 1930, it seeks to answer several questions fundamental to human society and its organization: What influences led to the creation of civilization? Why and how did it come to be? What determines civilization s trajectory? Freud s theories on the effect of the knowledge of death on human existence and the birth of art are central to his work. Of the various English translations of Freud s major works to appear in his lifetime, only Norton s Standard Edition, under the general editorship of James Strachey, was authorized by Freud himself. This new edition includes both an introduction by the renowned cultural critic and writer Christopher Hitchens as well as Peter Gay s classic biographical note on Freud."

A renowned scholar's reflections on the romantic period, its disparate participants, and our unacknowledged debt to them With his usual wit and elan, 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.

"Chess Story," also known as "The Royal Game," is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig's final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological.
Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. How he came to possess his extraordinary grasp of the game of chess and at what cost lie at the heart of Zweig's story.
This new translation of "Chess Story" brings out the work's unusual mixture of high suspense and poignant reflection.

In this classic work of intellectual history, Ernst Cassirer provides both a cogent synthesis and a penetrating analysis of one of history's greatest intellectual epochs: the Enlightenment. Arguing that there was a common foundation beneath the diverse strands of thought of this period, he shows how Enlightenment philosophers drew upon the ideas of the preceding centuries even while radically transforming them to fit the modern world. In Cassirer's view, the Enlightenment liberated philosophy from the realm of pure thought and restored it to its true place as an active and creative force through which knowledge of the world is achieved.

In a new foreword, Peter Gay considers "The Philosophy of the Enlightenment" in the context in which it was written--Germany in 1932, on the precipice of the Nazi seizure of power and one of the greatest assaults on the ideals of the Enlightenment. He also argues that Cassirer's work remains a trenchant defense against enemies of the Enlightenment in the twenty-first century.

"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

A collection of essays commemorating Hector Berlioz's life and work on the 200th anniversary of his birth. This far-reaching collection of heretofore unpublished studies ushers in the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Hector Berlioz [1803-1869]. The contributors include leading music historians and two prominent historians of culture, Peter Gay and Jacques Barzun. The essays discuss Berlioz's views of the music of the "past," Berlioz's interactions with music and musicians of his "present," and views of Berlioz during the several generations after his death [the "future"]. A long-awaited piece by Richard Macnutt meticulously inventories and investigates more than two hundred letters and documents that are now known to have been forged but that have sometimes been accepted as authentic. Further contributions, from David Charlton, Heather Hadlock, Sylvia L'Ecuyer, Katherine Kolb, Catherine Massip, Kerry Murphy, Jean-Michel Nectoux, Cecile Reynaud, and Lesley Wright, consider specific aspects of Berlioz's creative work and critical reception. The editor, Peter Bloom, is Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor of Humanities in the Department of Music at Smith College. His scholarly work has focused primarily on the life and workof Berlioz. He is a member of the Panel of Advisors of the New Berlioz Edition and the author of The Life of Berlioz.

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."

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.

Freud offers here intimate glimpses of his loyalty to his Jewish origins, his brilliance in school, his love for research, his sense of isolation during the years of his breaking through to psychoanalysis. For the most part, however, he concentrates on his intellectual development rather than his inner life. An Autobiographical Study was first published in 1925.

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.

"This is cultural history of the first order, and it is liberal and humane history at its very best."—David Cannadine

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. 12 b/w illustrations.

"If the past is envisioned as a foreign country, then there is no one, living or dead, better suited to serve as our guide than Peter Gay. In Schnitzler's Century, he has distilled a lifetime of learning into 320 pages of sparkling prose....I can't remember the last time I had such fun—and learned so much—from any work of history or nonfiction."—David Nasaw, winner of the Bancroft Prize for The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst

"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

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 CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS.

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.

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.

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 revelatory work that examines the intricate relationship between history and literature, truth and fiction—with some surprising conclusions.

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 provocative triptych of essays....Written in elegant prose, and wearing its extensive scholarship lightly...continually stimulating."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Peter Gay, the prominent cultural historian, here does a skillful turn as a literary critic....Reading Savage Reprisals is like sitting in a college lecture hall and listening to a seasoned professor perform scintillating riffs on masterworks and their contexts."—David Reynolds, New York Times

"The great strength of these essays is that they are truly a pleasure to read: lucid, accessible, sharp, entertaining and witty, written in crisp, inviting prose."—Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times

The concluding volume in Peter Gay's magisterial study of the European and American middle classes from the 1820s to the outbreak of World War I.

The Victorians we meet in this volume range from the capitalists in the top tier of the bourgeoisie, eager to be recognized as gentlemen, to the clerks and craftsmen fearful of sinking into the proletariat. Peter Gay's aim throughout this sweeping work of cultural history is to widen our perception of Victorian bourgeois life, to replace monochromatic generalizations with revealing portraits of men and women in all the colorful complexity of their lives.

"Rich in its accounting for the often surprising details, the necessary 'facts' (among them much newly discovered material), sovereign in its generalizing interpretations, elegant in its presentation, and revisionist in its central thesis, this volume is a 'must' for anyone interested in the history of the 'bourgeois century.' "—Reinhold Brinkmann, Harvard University

"Like everything Peter Gay writes, Pleasure Wars is a great delight — and much more!"—Robert Heilbroner

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 second volume of Peter Gay's in-depth study of the dawn of the modern world—the Age of Reason.

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 comprehensive and magisterial study. . . . A magnificent achievement." —J. W. Burrow, Saturday Review

"Peter Gay proves here to be fascinating, original, and humane—a genial guide even when so concerned with conflict." —Kirkus Reviews

"Compendious, learned, stylishly argued." —George Steiner, The New Yorker

"Peter Gay makes comprehensible, as no other recent history I have read does, how a seemingly remote assassination in Sarajevo could tip over an entire civilization. . . [His] writings make the past make emotional sense." —Richard Sennett, Los Angeles Times Book Review

For nearly a hundred years, aggression lurked beneath the surface of bourgeois culture, emerging occasionally to split the social order into insiders and outsiders. The Victorians gave themselves permission to ridicule, bully, patronize, and exploit individuals and classes, races and nations that they deemed inferior. But they sought civilized rationales for their conduct, whether in the hunt for profits from new commercial ventures, for power in the political arena, or for dominance over new movements that were bringing women out from domesticity.

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—Theodore Roosevelt, Otto von Bismarck, George Sand, Emile Zola, Sade, Nietzsche, and many others—come into a new perspective. In pursuing the great Victorian debate over aggression, Peter Gay brings new light to familiar themes, and introduces subjects 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 winning the great battles against nature.