The Cultivation of Hatred (The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud, Vol 3)

Rating:
Summary: The Highlight of the Five Volume Set (thus far...)
Review: [...] This five volume history of the victorian bourgeois follows a freudian schematic: the first volume dealt with love, the second with sex, and this volume with agression.

This book was my favorite of the three I've read so far. Gay picks apart the Victorian penchant for cloaked agression with admirable scholastic fortitude. His discussion of Foucault's theory of prisons is a high light for this entire five volume set.

His critique of what he calls the "social control" theorists is that they fail to take into account the ability of the powerful to delude themselves into thinking they are doing the right thing, even when they are most assuredly not.

Why stop here? Only two more volumes to go...