The author of the bestseller Freud presents a close examination of the aggression--and debate about aggression--that raged through the Victorian Age. Gay looks at the works of such figures as Theodore Roosevelt and Nietzsche to present penetrating new insights.

The 19th century was intensely preoccupied with the self, to the point of neurosis. During the decades of the most sustained campaign for mastery of the world, the bourgeois devoted much time to introspection. This book, fourth in a series of five, deals with the inner life and charts this struggle for inwardness. Philosophers from Hegel to Nietzsche, psychologists like Wundt and Charcot, and Marx and Freud are included, but it is the ordinary bourgeois who occupy centre stage.

"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.