Peter Gay Research Articles

Enlightenolatry from Peter Gay to Steven Pinker: Mass Marketing Enlightenment and the Thick Eighteenth Century

Abstract: Peter Gay's two-volume study, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966/69), won the National Book Award in 1966, where its tendentious version of the Enlightenment was embraced as a moderate, hopeful response to the radicalized public sphere of the 1960s. This essay argues that Gay's achievement, and the interdisciplinary seminar that he founded at Columbia University to develop it, provided a key impetus for the organization of the institutional study of eighteenth-century studies. Moreover, the constellation of ideas celebrated as the "Enlightenment" in Gay's work has provided an enduring template for twenty-first-century Enlightenolatrists like Steven Pinker, whose Enlightenment Now (2018) slavishly follows Gay's argument. The persistence of Gay's "undead text," in the sense of Lorraine Daston and Sharon Marcus's phrase (2019), suggests an additional and troubling dimension to eighteenth-century studies beyond the "wide" and "deep" eighteenth centuries as theorized by Felicity Nussbaum (2003) and Joseph Roach (2007).

The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob

Reviewed by: The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob Anna Tomaszewska The Secular Enlightenment. By Margaret C. Jacob. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2019. Pp. xi, 339. $29.95. ISBN 9780691161327.) The author of the seminal Radical Enlightenment (1981) has proposed another category encapsulating intellectual, social, and political metamorphoses spurred by [End Page 214] the "Age of Enlightenment." In eight chapters that take the reader through Western European and trans-Atlantic spaces and times spanning from the late seventeenth century until the 1790s, Margaret Jacob pictures the emergence of "the secular world" in which human life would increasingly center on the here and now without "a necessary reference to a transcendent order" (pp. 1–2). For Jacob, secularization does not imply a complete repudiation of religion, but redefining its meaning as a cultural practice, an approach traceable to The Religious Ceremonies and Customs (1723–43) by Jean Frederick Bernard and Bernard Picart. The secular Enlightenment turned toward science under Newton's auspices, witnessed budding sensitivity to social injustice and inequalities, criticized the alliance between church and state, and brought the development of the university culture. Clandestine literature and new forms of sociability, practiced in masonic lodges, city clubs, and cafés, created a global space of shared ideas and ideals: equality, cosmopolitanism, universal brotherhood. Inventions, such as that of the pendulum clock, prompted changes in the perception of time dedicated more and more to this-worldly activities. The secular ways became manifest in the lives of countless travelers, publishers, industrialists, academics, scientists, and poets—both minor figures, some of them female, and the leading protagonists of the epoch. France prepared the ground for the outbreak of its 1789 revolution: the deism, materialism, and atheism of the philosophes provided a setting in which the absolute monarchy and priestly privilege could be challenged. The Scottish enlighteners favored pragmatic topics: taxes, commerce, and how to counteract poverty, which would set the background for the development of capitalism and the conception of historical progress. Germany staged the advocacy of secular ethics and politics, the publication of subversive writings attacking organized religion, conflicts between rationalist philosophers and state authorities, and finally the resurgence of Spinozism that constituted the naturalist underpinnings for "a universal humanism" (p. 197). The Italians, overcoming tensions between the Catholic Church and the enlightened values, contributed to political economy with theories of money and trade, and to political theory by laying the foundations for a constitutional republic that would later serve as a model for the Americans. The way was also paved for abolishing torture, slavery, and eventually death penalty. Social and political unrest accompanied the demise of the Enlightenment, which set in motion the "creation of the democratic citizen," necessitating a "personal transformation … often transgressive of customs and mores" (p. 236), particularly those related to family life. The Enlightenment, which persisted in the writings of the Romantics, brought along "the secular" that "had become all pervasive" (p. 264). Jacob's fascinatingly many-layered and multifaceted account of the Enlightenment unfolds the extent to which its ideas have shaped our times, yet occasionally her usage of '"enlightened" slips from merely descriptive into normative. Jacob does not side with the proponents of the "religious Enlightenment"—the claim that religious controversies could have triggered the secularizing impulse (Jeffrey D. Burson) or that the "Age of Reason" made possible new forms of belief (David Sorkin). Her allegiance stays with those who, like Peter Gay, link the Enlightenment with the [End Page 215] secular. However, although Jacob's account expresses attachment to the secular values which have come to be associated with liberal democratic culture that some believe to prevail nowadays, it also perpetuates the view of those critics of the Enlightenment who would see in it a movement of dissent from Christianity. Anna Tomaszewska Jagellonian University in Krakow Copyright © 2022 The Catholic University of America Press

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 by Clare Pettitt

Reviewed by: Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 by Clare Pettitt David E. Latané (bio) Clare Pettitt, Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. xviii + 348, $85/£65 cloth. Serial Forms is one in a line of intriguing, wide-ranging, and often enthralling books that cast the widest nets to reel in the material and intellectual phenomena of nineteenth-century British culture. Works such as Richard Stein’s Victoria’s Year: British Literature and Culture, 1837–1838 (1989), James Chandler’s England in 1819 (1999), or the more recent What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History by Tom Mole (2019) have ignored disciplinary boundaries to freely roam across media and events. Clare Pettitt’s project to complete a trilogy of books showing the birth of the modern to the end of World War I is self-consciously ambitious, along the lines of Peter Gay’s five-volume The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (1984–98). The book reflects immense study. The bibliography, thirty-five pages of close print, begins with Carolyn Abbate’s A History of Opera (2012) and concludes with Slajov Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). Footnotes sometimes creep into the top half of the page, allowing for careful consideration of the evolution of scholarship. Gratifyingly, predecessors such as Richard Altick and Brian Maidment are not only cited in the notes but also discussed. Pettitt expertly weaves together various strands to show how the growing infiltration of seriality into every aspect of culture forms “the dynamic processes involved in calibrating a new form of social time” (292). The page-turning and page-anticipating urgencies of the expanding news media are only one aspect of the case for the modern’s emergence. Serial Forms has chapters exploring the intersections of shows, such as the panorama and diorama; theatrical spectacles; exhibited paintings like Géricault’s “Shipwreck of the Medusa” at the Egyptian Hall (1820); canonical works, such as Childe Harold (1812–18), Don Juan (1819–24), and fictions by Sir Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer; and the play of spatial and temporal scale in works by Thomas Carlyle, Augustus Pugin, and Charles Dickens. Pettitt accurately observes that the period 1820–37 “has long been a neglected and arid field in British literary studies” (8). The same cannot be said for periodical studies, as it was the heyday of Blackwood’s, Fraser’s, and the Keepsake craze, not to mention The Times at its thundery best. Amidst the riches of Serial Forms are two chapters especially relevant to periodical scholars. Chapter 6, “History in Miniature,” makes a strong case for the centrality of a group of popular titles that are too often overlooked: the information-oriented non-news weeklies like the Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (1822–50) and the Penny Magazine [End Page 376] (1832–45). The next chapter, “Biopolitics of Seriality,” uses the short run of the weekly Howitt’s Journal (1847–48) “to consider how seriality was becoming increasingly important to the creation and maintenance of what we might now call biopolitics” (251). “History in Miniature” starts with a remark in David Copperfield (1850) about how the Peggottys take the sort of pleasure they might receive from “a pocket model of the Colosseum” when seeing Little Em’ly and David side-by-side in their boat-house (213). What does a shrunken model of a large Roman ruin mean in this context and to such people? The chapter examines how cheap illustrated periodicals helped cause a seismic shift in attitudes toward the historical past. This shift was abetted, somewhat ironically, by the “taxes on knowledge” that meant a penny paper could not contain news—only knowledge. Pettitt explores how the intersections of “models, panoramas, inexpensive toys, dioramas, stage sets and prints, and engravings and woodcuts in the cheap press” made it possible for society “to consume the past as never before” (216). Perhaps most importantly, “novel time-space frames were beginning to be inserted into the common experience of working class people” (216). The “promiscuous miscellanity” of the cheap papers, she argues, works differently than in...

The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason ed. by Jeffrey D. Burson and Anton M. Matytsin

Reviewed by: The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reasoned. by Jeffrey D. Burson and Anton M. Matytsin Gianni Paganini Jeffrey D. Burson and Anton M. Matytsin, editors. The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason. Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment. Gregory S. Brown, General Editor. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019. Pp. 235. Paper, £65.00. In the last half century, the image of the Enlightenment underwent many changes and no longer is monolithic, as was the case with Paul Hazard, Peter Gay, and Ernst Cassirer. It is usual nowadays to talk about national Enlightenments, moderate and radical Enlightenment, religious Enlightenments, counter-Enlightenment, and so on. In this process of widening the notion of Enlightenment, which the editors depict as a real "explosion," there is also [End Page 615]room for a skeptical Enlightenment, which not so long ago was limited to a few, supposedly fringe figures: Bayle, Hume, and Rousseau. The ubiquitous "specter" of skepticism that Burson and Matytsin see as present all along the eighteenth century comprises also the reactions and responses to skepticism. Actually, besides enriching enormously the mapping of skeptical thinkers in the age of reason, the editors advance a more daring thesis: the interaction between skepticism and anti-skepticism would ultimately qualify the very meanings of the terms 'reason' and 'rationality,' redefining the powers and the limits of human understanding, and bringing about a new, more comprehensive definition of the Enlightenment. The authors of the different chapters show that the imperative to overcome doubt and uncertainty stimulated some of the most innovative characteristics of the Enlightenment. For example, Burson deals with the Jesuits and the skeptical crisis, Martin Mulsow and John C. Laursen with legal skepticism, Rodrigo Brandao with Voltaire, Sébastien Charles with Berkeley, and John P. Wright with skepticism in Bayle and Hume. In the Introduction, the editors react to the thesis, advanced by Jonathan Israel, that the skeptical crisis was resolved by the partisans of the "radical Enlightenment," and emphasize by contrast the persistence and fertility of the debates on skepticism. The target of the volume is, in the editors' words, "any overly reductive and celebratory paradigms of the Enlightenment," and especially explanations ex post factothat "whiggishly derive a conjectural and triumphalist origin narrative of a historically distorted definition" (5). This collection of essays thus challenges several prevailing interpretations of the Enlightenment. However, the reader has sometimes the impression that the editors fall into the same mistake that they charge others with, even if the values they stress are different from the "radical" or the "pagan" vulgate. Is it not the same, albeit inverted, essentialist error to claim that the learned culture of the eighteenth century was "an age of skepticism" rather than an "age of reason"? To counter unidirectional teleological explanations of "whiggish" style, the editors risk falling into opposite oversimplifications when claiming that "philosophical skepticism, far more than certainty and the glib assumption of inevitable progress, was, in fact, the crucible of the Enlightenment process" (8). Without any doubt, it is important to stress the fact that skepticism was an important aspect of the eighteenth-century culture; but substituting a part for the whole is never wise. Caution is all the more legitimate as the editors, in their sketch of "the age of skepticism, c. 1500–1750" (8), neglect other important aspects that do not fit in their schema. For example, in light of recent post-Popkin scholarship, it is astonishing that Matytsin and Burson still place under the same label of "Christian skepticism" authors who are very different from each other, such as Montaigne, Charron, La Mothe Le Vayer, and Huet. Only the latter was a true "Christian skeptic," while La Mothe, especially in his juvenile works, was much more a pagan than a Christian skeptic. As for Montaigne and Charron, they established the canon of the "honnête homme," who is not simply a believer, but also a moralist, a fine connoisseurof human nature, a defender of toleration, a proto-anthropologist of societies, customs, religions, and civilizations. Nonetheless, it is certainly a very good thing that Enlightenment skepticism at last leaves the margins of history and enters the range...

Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music, 1918–33 by Nicholas Attfield

Reviewed by: Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music, 1918–33 by Nicholas Attfield Daniel F. Boomhower Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music, 1918–33. By Nicholas Attfield. (British Academy Monographs.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, 2017. [222 p. ISBN 9780197266137 (hardcover), $105.] Illustrations, index. The Weimar Republic, the dynamic but ill-fated social experiment couched between the bitter end of World War I in 1918 and the overthrow of democratic institutions by the Nazi Party in 1933, continues to fascinate many imaginations in many realms. Emerging from the rubble of the militaristic plutocracy of Kaiser Wilhelm II and his adjutants, Weimar Germany convulsed with populist yearnings for security and self-determination from all corners of the political spectrum. In the midst of nearly constant political and economic upheaval, a seemingly unbridled wave of creativity surged through Germany, made manifest on a collective scale by the achievements of the Bauhaus and on an individual level in masterworks by Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz, Alfred Döblin, Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, and many others. Peter Gay brilliantly summarized not only artistic but also political currents in his Weimar Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) by characterizing the social phenomenon of "the outsider as insider" that resulted from the toppling of the Wilhelmine order. Suddenly, individuals who previously had no voice in society now wielded tremendous influence. Even though artistic innovations that would become synonymous with Weimar culture had already emerged before World War I, the liberalism of Weimar society allowed for an unprecedented popular affirmation of the creative arts in a multitude of genres. The possibility of access to an expanded audience extended not only to innovators but also to those steeped in artistic traditions. Nevertheless, the aptness of Gay's characterization of the cultural situation stems from the reality that outsiders remained outsiders, even in those instances where they found themselves, often only temporarily, as insiders. Michael H. Kater looms nearly as large as Peter Gay in studies of German music during the 1920s and 1930s. Fittingly, Kater appropriated Gay's contrast of the "revolt of the son" and the "revenge of the father," as the two final chapters of Gay's Weimar Culture are titled, in a brief article contrasting progressive and conservative composers of the 1920s ("The Revenge of the Fathers: The Demise of Modern Music at the End of the Weimar Republic," German Studies Review 15, no. 2 [May 1992]: 295–315). Nicholas Attfield, in Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music, 1918–33, takes what he considers Kater's reductionist interpretation of musical conservatives as a point of departure for his introduction, "Weimar Culture and Its Others," arguing the need for a more nuanced evaluation of the full breadth of musical life in an era primarily associated with innovations. In his first chapter, "Music and the Idea of a Conservative Revolution," Attfield strives to relate musical conservatisms with broader considerations of a "conservative revolution" occurring in the years following World War I (p. 17). [End Page 436] The core of Attfield's book consists of four case studies through which he seeks to exhibit a diversity of conservatisms during the period. He writes: "In part, I have chosen these specific examples because, though in some ways characterized by what might be called 'cultural pessimism' or 'anti-modernism,' 'irrationalism' or 'traditionalism,' they also resist the stereotype discussed above by simultaneously placing a powerful accent on rebirth, regrowth, and rejuvenation; this is an accent, indeed, often couched in the most revolutionary rhetoric" (p. 10). The first case study, "'Sympathie mit dem Tode': Thomas Mann, Hans Pfitzner, and the Further Reflections of a Non-Political Man," concerns Pfitzner's turn from opera and his aspiration to reach a wider audience through populist oratorio. The second case study, "'Innerer Betrachtung gewidmet': Alfred Heuss, the Zeitschrift für Musik, and the Music Journal as Community," considers Heuss's series of editorials "dedicated to inner reflection" that ran over a nearly two-year period and in which the views of his mentor Hermann Kretzschmar are extolled and extended (p. 78). Much like Pfitzner, Heuss had established...

Гомосексуальность, работа и старение: мужской вопрос. Рецензия на книгу: Robinson P. (2017) Gay Men’s Working Lives, Retirement and Old Age, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Гомосексуальность, работа и старение: мужской вопрос. Рецензия на книгу: Robinson P. (2017) Gay Men’s Working Lives, Retirement and Old Age, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment by Anton M. Matytsin

Reviewed by: The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment by Anton M. Matytsin Roger Maioli Anton M. Matytsin. The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2016. Pp. xi + 361. $60. This book is an illuminating reappraisal of the two broad topics in its title: skepticism and Enlightenment. On the one hand, it revises a thesis made popular by Richard Popkin, rearticulating the impact of skepticism on eighteenth-century intellectual history. On the other, it opposes traditional accounts of the Enlightenment as an age of reason against faith, seeking to reintegrate religious thinkers into a progressive history of knowledge. Siding with Popkin on the historical importance of skepticism, Mr. Matytsin offers a more layered account of its reception and influence. To begin with, skepticism "was not always the cause, but often the result, of intense, mutually destructive debates among dogmatic philosophies." Between the sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries, unending controversies in metaphysics, natural philosophy, and historiography fostered reticence regarding claims to certainty. This reticence, the book's argument goes, sets the stage for the spread of skepticism—especially in its Pyrrhonian variety, given currency through the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism (1562; first French translation, 1725) and the publication of Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697). Popkin and others have shown that responses to Pyrrhonism made concessions to doubt and replaced old metaphysical certainties with more modest claims to probable knowledge. But this "mitigated skepticism," according to Mr. Matytsin, was not the single-handed achievement of antireligious philosophers; it was also fully articulated by [End Page 158] Protestant and Catholic antiskeptics such as Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, Laurent-Josse Le Clerc, and Friedrich Wilhelm Bierling. In seeking to shield religion from the skeptical critique, they "were successful in promoting pragmatic solutions, such as the recourse to moral certainty and probability." Their arguments were then retooled by less pious writers, including the central figures of the French Enlightenment. The novelty of this argument resides less in its picture of skepticism than in its attention to antiskepticism, an uncoordinated international phenomenon involving less well-known figures whom Mr. Matytsin does much to revitalize. The book is especially valuable in its treatment of Crousaz, a Swiss logician and devout Huguenot whom Popkin dismisses as unimportant, but whose Examen du pyrrhonisme ancien et modern (1733) may have been the most extensive and sustained response to Pyrrhonism in the long eighteenth century. As Mr. Matytsin demonstrates, Crousaz's work inflected not only the historical skepticism of Gibbon but also the responses to Pyrrhonism at the Académie de Prusse, a fertile seedbed for Enlightenment materialism. In bringing the Huguenot diaspora as well as Jesuit intellectuals into the fold of the Enlightenment, Mr. Matytsin is joining the postsecular turn in Enlightenment studies—represented among others by J.G.A. Pocock, Karen O'Brien, and Thomas Ahnert—while acknowledging that to make the case for a religious Enlightenment also deflates "the Enlightenment" as a historical category. For his purposes, "the Age of Enlightenment" serves mostly as a chronological framework, with boundaries in 1697 (when Bayle's Dictionnaire brought the skeptical crisis into the limelight) and 1772 (when the Encyclopédie was completed), but the framework has no philosophical program and no body of central doctrines. In treating "the Enlightenment" as essentially another name for "eighteenth-century intellectual history," this book takes to task more essentialist accounts of the movement—whether by Paul Hazard and Peter Gay or by Jonathan Israel—on the grounds that they restrict their focus to premonitions of the French Revolution or of modern secular values. "By exploring the intellectual universe of the eighteenth century on its own terms," Mr. Matytsin states, "scholars might finally abandon the intellectual crutch provided by the increasingly meaningless phrase the Enlightenment and walk unaided toward previously unexplored avenues and unexpected connections." His study is a compelling example of where those avenues may lead. In calling for a more capacious conception of Enlightenment, Mr. Matytsin paradoxically also returns to a narrower view of the movement, one that scholars since Pocock have been especially invested in transcending. Here the Enlightenment means the Francophone Enlightenment, whether...

NASAL HIGH FLOW THERAPY VERSUS OXYGEN SUPPLEMENTATION IN POSTOPERATIVE CARE OF OBSTRUCTIVE SLEEP APNEA PATIENTS WITH CPAP NON-COMPLIANCE: A PILOT RANDOMIZED STUDY

SESSION TITLE: Comorbid Diseases and Sleep Apnea SESSION TYPE: Original Investigations PRESENTED ON: 10/10/2018 07:30 AM - 08:30 AM PURPOSE: Increased postoperative oxygen desaturations in obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) patients have being associated with increased ICU admissions and adverse cardiopulmonary events. Nasal High Flow (NHF) therapy in OSA improves oxygen stores by increasing upper airway patency and lung volumes and by decreasing dead space. Our objective was to compare the efficacy of Nasal High Flow Therapy (NHF) with low-flow oxygen supplementation in improving postoperative intermittent desaturations of OSA patients with CPAP non-compliance. METHODS: We conducted a single blinded randomized controlled trial, in which OSA patients with CPAP non-compliant were recruited from the pre-operative evaluation (POE) clinic. Patients were confirmed to have OSA by polysomnographic study, and declined to use of CPAP for upcoming elective surgery. Participants with an apnea–hypopnea index of ≥ 5 events per hour were randomly assigned to receive NHF at 30 LPM plus oxygen at 1 LPM or oxygen supplement at 1 LPM via nasal cannula (control) during the first post-surgical night. Baseline demographic, cardiovascular risks and post-operative recovery room’s vital signs were collected. The primary outcome was the 4% oxygen desaturation index (ODI 4%) in the first postoperative night. The analysis was done by using JMP 12.2 (SAS, NC) RESULTS: Of 50 OSA patients who underwent randomization, 42 (84%) completed the study, All of them were evaluated for the ODI 4% in the first postoperative night. On average, the ODI 4% was statistically higher in the group receiving NHF [7.4 median (IQR=3.5-13.3) events per hour] than in the group receiving oxygen supplementation alone [3.1 median (IQR=1.5-6.7) events per hour]; p=0.024. NHF was equally effective to supplemental oxygen alone to reduce ODI 4% < 10 events/h [19 patients (90.5%) in NHF vs. 15 patients (71.4%) in control group; p = 0.24) CONCLUSIONS: In moderate-severe OSA patients with CPAP non-compliance, NHF therapy did not offer any advantage over supplemental oxygen alone, but both therapies were equally effective in reducing the 4%ODI to < 10 events/h during the first postoperative night. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: Nasal High Flow Therapy (NHF) at low flow (30 LPM) did not offer any advantage over supplemental oxygen alone to treat postoperative oxygen desaturations in moderate-severe OSA patients with CPAP non-compliance. NHF at higher flow rates may be needed to reach increased upper airway patency and decreased dead space in these patients. Alternatively, NHF may have a role in milder forms of OSA. Further studies are needed to determine the role of NHF in the perioperative management of OSA patients. DISCLOSURES: No relevant relationships by Bhargavi Gali, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Peter Gay, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Rahul Kashyap, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Timothy Morgenthaler, source=Web Response No relevant relationships by Bernardo Selim, source=Web Response

HISTORICIZING FREUD: AUTOPSY OR REINCARNATION?

The publication between 2014 and 2017 of four substantial historical biographies of Sigmund Freud raises a number of questions that should be of interest to intellectual and cultural historians. Both Freud's reputation as a pioneering empirical investigator and brilliant theorist of human subjectivity, and his influential role in framing public discussion of the unconscious dynamics and conscious expressions of the “psyche” or the “soul” have been declining for a number of decades. Apparently we have finally reached that point in time at which W. H. Auden's famous comment (in his 1939 elegy) that Freud was “a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives” no longer resonates.1 Unlike the last major historical Freud biography, Peter Gay's Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), which still worked assiduously to sustain the contemporary presence and thus cross-cultural and cross-temporal validity of Freud's discoveries as empirically grounded, universal rational truths, recent works by Frederick Crews, Joel Whitebook, Élisabeth Roudinesco, and Peter-André Alt attempt to historicize Freud's work in a more critical and fundamental fashion. The perspectives governing all of these studies are self-consciously “historical.” They build their interpretations of Freud's work and their judgements regarding its claims on investigations of the temporally situated, personal, sociocultural and theoretical contexts which conditioned and therefore limited or “relativized” its meaning and its truth. For three of the biographers (all except Crews) this also implies that Freud's work was not so much a completed articulation of an investigative method (either positivist or hermeneutical) that unveiled a singular interpretation or “discovery” of a general truth as the representation of an open-ended process of investigating and thinking through the problem of the origin, development and nature of the human “soul.” From this perspective the attempt to grasp Freud's work as a fully articulated truth or completed interpretation that can now be seen as historically limited or framed by specific cultural contexts is to read Freud's life and work within assumptions about closed cultural systems or temporally bounded climates of opinion, assumptions that have themselves become a part of the historical past.

Arthur Schnitzler: Anatom des Fin de Siècle by Max Haberich

Reviewed by: Arthur Schnitzler: Anatom des Fin de Siècle by Max Haberich Dagmar C. G. Lorenz Max Haberich, Arthur Schnitzler: Anatom des Fin de Siècle. Vienna: Kremayr & Scheriau, 2017. 320 pp. If every generation requires a new history of literature, then, too, new studies on the life and work of noted authors are always in order. Max Haberich provides a study on Schnitzler and his times under the subtitle Anatom des Fin de Siècle, which integrates biographical and interpretative parts into a commentary on the critical debates of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries pertaining to the author at hand. Recent research and scholarship on Jewish literary and social studies facilitate Haberich’s contextualization of Schnitzler and his oeuvre in historically specific terms [End Page 124] and position the author within the current discourse on the intellectual culture of Austro-Hungary. This includes the coffeehouses, cabarets, and other public venues that were part of the public sphere open to Schnitzler and his fellow writers and intellectuals. Haberich examines Schnitzler’s background and personal life in a more realistic and less deferential manner than was the case with earlier critics. The result is a rather contemporary Schnitzler construct emerging from a fresh look at the author’s literary and autobiographical writings. Haberich’s study transcends the fin-de-siècle framework while remaining mindful of the fin-de-siècle as Schnitzler’s focal theme that also colored the author’s attitude toward the post–World War I republic. Leaving the war virtually unaddressed, as Haberich notes, and becoming increasingly the target of anti-Semitic hostilities in the 1920s, Schnitzler examined the new Austrian republic through a fin-de-siècle lens and with a latent nostalgia of a time and setting that he criticized while they lasted. Schnitzler infused his view of the “modern” Austrian republic with sexual, sentimental, and Jewish content that harkened back to the prewar era. Indeed, some of his works written before the war, such as Reigen, fueled public scandals in the interwar years. In conjunction with his professional difficulties, Haberich traces the mounting difficulties in Schnitzler’s personal life such as his divorce from Olga Gussmann after eighteen years of marriage and the suicide of his daughter Lili, who had married an Italian fascist. Reflections of these events, Haberich shows, appear in the later oeuvre. Haberich’s critical narrative establishes convincing connections between Schnitzler’s life situations, his literary production, and his fascination and engagement with innovations, for example, with film as the medium of the future. Haberich discusses the intersection of personal and literary development issues that the existence of Schnitzler’s extensive correspondences, diaries, and notes makes especially compelling. Not all of those documents have become accessible to date, which leaves mysterious informational gaps, for example the exact circumstances that precipitated Lily Schnitzler’s suicide. Issues with which the author contended, including the demise of the Habsburg monarchy, his concerns about Lily’s vulnerability, and his critical stance toward the continued honor code of the military, correspond with Schnitzler’s personal convictions and formed sources of inspiration for works such as Fräulein Else, Traumnovelle, and Spiel im Morgengrauen. Likewise, the fascination with the occult and secret societies [End Page 125] in Schnitzler’s generation, coupled with concerns about the disintegrating family and gender structures inform the later works. Haberich observes both continuities and attitudinal changes between Schnitzler’s pre– and post– World War I works, which illustrate Schnitzler’s responses to the changing climate but also attest to his versatility at a time when many critics considered him a man of the past. Over the decades Schnitzler has drawn attention from prominent scholars as the innumerable studies on his life, work, and times document, including Heinrich Schnitzler, Christian Brandstätter; and Reinhard Urbach’s Arthur Schnitzler: sein Leben, sein Werk, seine Zeit (1981); Peter Gay’s Schnitzler and His Century: The Making of the Middle Class (2002); the general studies by Hartmut Scheible (1976), Michaela Perlman (1987), Renate Wagner (2006), and Richard Specht (2014); and explorations of Schnitzler’s family and relationships in context, such as Friedrich Rothe’s Arthur Schnitzler and Adele Sandrock (1998) and Jutta...

THE ENLIGHTENMENT IN NEW FOCUS

Enlightenment scholars have had some difficulty in getting the German Enlightenment in focus. If one's conception of the Enlightenment has been shaped by reading Peter Gay and Robert Darnton, then the German Enlightenment fails to fit their model. France offers us the picture of an intelligentsia, largely located in the capital, maintaining a degree of independence with some help from patrons, and in many cases opposed to the governing regime. Whether, like Gay, one focuses on the high-profile frequenters of the Parissalons, or, like Darnton, on half-starved hack writers, one has something approaching the modern conception of the intellectual, and hence a flattering genealogy for present-day intellectuals. It is easy to forget thatphilosophescould also be professional administrators, like the economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, and that Enlightened thinking was also diffused throughout the provinces by academies and scholarly networks.

Anxiety and Politics

The English version of this article was first published in 1957. The journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism &amp; Critique republished it 60 years later in 2017. In this essay, Franz L. Neumann discusses the role of anxiety in politics. The article asks: How does it happen that the masses sell their souls to leaders and follow them blindly? On what does the power of attraction of leaders over masses rest? What are the historical situations in which this identification of leader and masses is successful, and what view of history do the men have who accept leaders? For answering these questions, the author suggests a combination of political economy, Freudian political psychology, and ideology critique. He sees anxiety in the context of alienation. Alienation is analysed as a multidimensional phenomenon consisting of economic, political, social and psychological alienation. Neumann introduces the notions of Caesaristic identification, institutionalised anxiety and persecutory anxiety. The essay shows that fascism remains an actual threat in capitalist societies.Acknowledgement: The editors of tripleC express their gratitude to the Neumann and Marcuse families for their support in republishing this essay, to Simon &amp; Schuster for granting us the rights, and to Denise Rose Hansen for her invaluable editorial assistance. Original source: From the book “The Democratic and the Authoritarian State” by Franz Neumann. Copyright © 1957 by the Free Press. Copyright renewed © 1985 by the Free Press, a division of Macmillan, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon &amp; Schuster, Inc. Originally delivered as a lecture before the Free University of Berlin and published in the series “Recht und Staat,” Tübingen,1954. Translated by Professor Peter Gay. This article is published in tripleC without a CC licence.About the AuthorFranz Leopold Neumann (1900-1954) was a political theorist associated with the Frankfurt School. He obtained a doctoral degree in legal studies at the University of Frankfurt with the dissertation „Rechtsphilosophische Einleitung zu einer Abhandlung über das Verhältnis von Staat und Strafe“ (A Legal-Philosophical Introduction to A Treatise on the Relationship between the State and Punishment). Neumann became the German Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) main legal advisor at a time when the Nazis and Hitler gained strength in Germany. At the time when Hitler came to power in 1933, the legal office had to be closed and Neumann had to flee from Germany. In London, he in 1936 obtained his second doctoral degree from the London School of Economics with the work “The Governance of the Rule of Law” under the supervision of Harold Laski and Karl Mannheim. Neumann moved to New York in 1936, where he became a member of the Institute of Social Research (also known as the “Frankfurt School”) that was then in exile in the USA. In 1942, he started working for the Office of Strategic Service (OSS), where he together with Herbert Marcuse and Otto Kirchheimer analysed Nazi Germany. In 1942, Neumann published his main book is Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944 (2nd, updated edition published in 1944), one of the most profound analyses of Nazi Germany’s political economy and ideology. Franz L. Neumann died in 1954 in a car accident.

“Old and Dirty Gods”: Religion and Freud’s Wednesday Night Psychological Society—from Habsburg Vienna, to the Holocaust

Freud's insistent atheism—and his somewhat contradictory, obsessional return to the topic of religion throughout his cultural writings—are both well documented. In a 1918 letter to the Swiss pastor-psychoanalyst Oskar Pfister, he described himself as “a completely godless Jew.” Less well known, however, are the attitudes toward religion among Freud’s “Wednesday Night Psychological Society”—Freud’s immediate circle of psychoanalysts in Vienna, Austria. Historian Peter Gay in his critical biography of Freud concluded that “Freud’s view of religion as the enemy was wholly shared by the first generation of psychoanalysts. The attempts of some later psychoanalysts to reconcile psychoanalysis with religion would never have found the slightest sympathy in Freud and his colleagues.” This article will contest this premise based on my research as a Fulbright Fellow at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna in 2013-14, beginning with the research question: “What religious themes appear in discussions and writings of Freud’s Wednesday Night Psychological Society?” Sources include the recorded Minutes of the group and its cultural journal Imago, through the vicissitudes, conflicts and expansions of the Society from its founding in 1902 to the year of its dissolution in the face of the Nazi terror of 1938 in Austria—and the ways in which their views on religion were more complex than traditionally assumed. In addition, this research uncovered the crucial impact of antisemitism as total context on the origins of psychoanalysis, fuelled by the close relationship between Catholicism and the Austrian Habsburg regime. The first analysts’ attitudes toward religion cannot be fully understood without taking this context of oppression into consideration. The article concludes with implications for the discipline of pastoral theology and pastoral psychotherapy.

Erasure of Voice in Postwar Japan: Derrida, Caruth, Ōe

Erasure of Voice in Postwar JapanDerrida, Caruth, Ōe Michiko Shimokobe (bio) Introduction The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941 (Japan time) marked the entry of the Empire of Japan into World War II. On August 14, 1945, Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration and surrendered to the Allied powers. How has Japan as a nation historicized the events of the war, the most important issue for the nation? The answer depends on which part of the entire course of the war you focus on: the outbreak of the war, the five years of being forced to endure ongoing warfare, or the conclusion to the war and the postwar period. In an exchange of letters with Einstein ("Why War?"), Freud says, "There is no question of getting rid entirely of human aggressive impulses" (1933, 358). In Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay comments on Freud's reaction to the reality of World War II: "the war had degenerated into a conflict more bloody than any of its predecessors and had produced that 'virtually inconceivable phenomenon,' an outburst of hate and contempt for the enemy" (2006, 355). The phrase "virtually inconceivable phenomenon" expresses a violent and immediate hatred for the enemy; it is the most disagreeable form of what Freud refers to as "humanity aggressive impulses." In his essay on war, Freud focuses primarily on human nature, coming up against "the great changes that have already taken place or are beginning to" (1915, 61). To research the causes of war and how war is executed is definitely a [End Page 73] fascinating theme for psychoanalysis. However, in this article, I will analyze the psychological mechanisms of individuals and nations at the termination of the war and its aftermath. How did World War II end from Japan's perspective, and how did Japan, a defeated nation, make the transition to postwar society? "Why War?" mentions "an instinctual inclination" (Freud 1933, 350) within men that is satisfied by killing an enemy. With regard to Einstein's anxiety, Freud explains men's susceptibility to murderous hatred as follows: You express astonishment at the fact that it is so easy to make men enthusiastic about a war and add your suspicions that there is something at work in them—an instinct for hatred and destruction—which goes halfway to meet the efforts of the warmongers. (355) If this is the case, it is important to examine how, once the war is over, the citizens of a defeated nation manage to deal with the "instinct for hatred and destruction" that spurred aggressive actions by the nation and individuals before and during the war. There are two obstacles to constructing history after a defeat. First, it is difficult to put a stop to the powerful psychological energy retained in the collective that was supported during the war, by the aggression in the human mind. Second, complex psychological work is required to acknowledge the enemy as a real person because the nation has been exposed to distorted images and the exaggerated falsehoods of propaganda to emphasize patriotism. Seen in this light, Japan had fought for a great cause in World War II, but the following problems arose as the war drew to an end. How did Japan process the aggression at the time of the unconditional surrender? How were the images of the Americans, the former enemy, transformed in the minds of the Japanese? The process of Japan's surrender at the end of World War II began on August 14, 1945, when the Japanese government notified the Allied powers that it would accept the Potsdam Declaration. On August 15, Japan's unconditional surrender was announced by Emperor Hirohito on the radio.1 On August 30, Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), arrived in Tokyo tasked with rebuilding the devastated nation. Following the surrender, President Truman approved the US [End Page 74] Initial Post-Surrender Policy for Japan on September 6.2 For the next six years until the end of the occupation in 1951, the military government was conducted solely by the United States. The occupation ended with the conclusion of the Treaty of San Francisco on September 8, 1951...

The Historical World of Peter Gay

Peter Gay, an American historian, died in May 2015. The aim of this paper is to eulogize his life as well as to shed some light on the works authored by him. His books include The enlightenment: An Interpretation, winner of the National Book Award in 1967, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, a perennial bestseller, and The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, multi-volume analysis of the bourgeoisie of the Victorian Age. As a non-religious Jew trapped in a Germanic culture, Peter Gay had a strong bond with Freud, who was in the same kind of predicament in an Austrian setting. That may explain why Gay had a special interest in Freud, and why he used Freudian scheme in his depiction of historical scenes. Not only as a historian but also as a critic of modern art, Gay left an un-ignorable imprint on the students of history and the reading public. As a person deeply grateful for the form and contents of his writings, I pray for him. May rest in peace, my mentor.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

In reasoned progression he outlined core psychoanalytic concepts, such as repression, free association and libido. Of the various English translations of Freud's major works to appear in his lifetime, only one was authorized by Freud himself: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud under the general editorship of James Strachey. Freud approved the overall editorial plan, specific renderings of key words and phrases, and the addition of valuable notes, from bibliographical and explanatory. Many of the translations were done by Strachey himself; the rest were prepared under his supervision. The result was to place the Standard Edition in a position of unquestioned supremacy over all other existing versions.Newly designed in a uniform format, each new paperback in the Standard Edition opens with a biographical essay on Freud's life and work -along with a note on the individual volume-by Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History at Yale.

O professor que cativa: entre a narrativa da história e o cuidado de si

This article presents and discusses the first steps of the research Teaching and narratives: the teacher and persuasion in the classroom, developed in the Post-Graduate Program in Education from UFRGS, at doctoral level, under the orientation of Professor Dr. Fernando Seffner. Starting from a reflection on the Teaching of History and analyzing the narrative character of history, through authors such as Hayden White, Peter Gay, Jorn Rusen, Paul Ricoeur, and Walter Benjamin, we want to understand what strategies are used by teachers in building their classes. We are interested in understanding what style and narrative elements compose a historical discourse able to get the support from scholars, starting from New Rhetoric references. In this analysis, what we propose is an art, the narrative on the creation and subjective lived experience (in this case, historical experience), understanding how history teachers prepare the historiographical knowledge in their classes. This development seeks to negotiate the gap between the past and the time of the student, creating moments of enchantment to the power of the word.

Two Notes, One Ending (Three Operas) at the Boundary of the Great Divide; or, Aesthetic Meanderings of the Sonic Psyche

Opera … puts normality into question. It's fair to say that subjectivity needed opera; it's a good deal more certain that opera needed subjectivity—or, better, the anxieties associated with subjectivity—for opera to have taken on the cultural force it enjoyed, particularly by the time history puts Wagner into the equation. As a principal site where subjectivity could be staged, witnessed, and indeed celebrated both visually and aurally, opera was at the same time a discourse that, by the very nature of its social standing and interpellative agency, attracted serious philosophical attention—witness Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche: opera was serious cultural business. Wagner in particular regarded opera as a form of cultural pedagogy, such being the ultimate function of Bayreuth, after all, in the composer's megalomaniacal urge for full and eternal control of his discourse and its social impact. The potential for entertainment as such had little purchase in Wagner's imaginary (and even without bothering with any of his endless musings on such matters, one gets that notion firmly established by nearly every thought that entered Cosima's head concerning her husband and duly confined to her diary). Bayreuth's hard-luck bench seating, not for nothing church-like, somatically reinforced a form of listening deemed appropriate for the wished-for Bildung of the proper bourgeois,1 no matter Wagner's ambivalence toward his social class; and, like church, the music was to be experienced, to borrow a phrase from Peter Gay, in “worshipful silence,”2 but certainly not without effect.

The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters, by Anthony Pagden

‘The Enlightenment’ was a term of historiographical art, gradually naturalised in English language usage from the late nineteenth century, widely popularised only from the mid-twentieth in order to create genealogies for modern social and intellectual crusades. Since, in the eighteenth century, ‘enlightenment’ was familiar but ‘the Enlightenment’ was unknown, the latter term can be made to mean whatever a present-day author wishes. Here, Anthony Pagden joins a long line of writers descending from Isaiah Berlin and Peter Gay with a survey written in a frankly normative tone, and with a prominent authorial presence: this is an essay in secular moralising, written to convey the central meaning that Pagden occupies the moral high ground while others do not. ‘If we regard ourselves as modern, if we are forward-thinking, if we are tolerant and generally open-minded … then we tend to think of ourselves as “enlightened”’. The Enlightenment has been ‘identified with an exalted view of human rationality and human benevolence’ (p. vii). ‘It is to the Enlightenment that we also owe the modern conception of the global society’ (p. viii). Key words throughout the book are ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’. Who precisely is meant is perhaps revealed in the Preface, which is dated from ‘Paris – Los Angeles – Venice’; and this formula probably does not reflect the life-experience of a persecuted émigré.

Enlightenment as Concept and Context.

Enlightenment as Concept and Context James Schmidt Enlightenment, Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, Ian Hunter, John Robertson, conceptual history, history of ideas, historiography of the Enlightenment The Ideas in Context series has served the Enlightenment well. Roughly a quarter of the first hundred books in the series deal (at least in part) with the period, including studies of Locke (Tully, Carey, Dawson), Rousseau (Rosenblatt), Smith (Forman-Barzilai), Mandeville (Goldsmith and Hundert), Thomasius (Hunter), the reception of Hobbes (Parkin), and a now-classic account of the ideological origins of the French Revolution (Baker).1 Of no less significance are broader-gauged examinations of the “common good” (Miller), “luxury” (Berry), and “empire” (Brown, Armitage), as well [End Page 677] as explorations of the Enlightenment’s relationship to Rational Dissenters (Haakonssen) and Judaism (Sutcliffe) and its debts to theories of natural law (Hochstrasser and Hunter).2 The nexus of commerce, politics, and history has also been a major concern of the series (Pocock, Tribe, Winch, Force, Robertson).3 But a tally of this sort only begins to register the significance of Ideas in Context for studies of the Enlightenment. As might be expected from a series ably shepherded by Quentin Skinner, significant methodological questions have also come to the fore. According to the statement that stands at the front of each volume, the goal of the series is to trace “the emergence of intellectual traditions and of related new disciplines” by setting the “procedures, aims, and vocabularies” generated by these traditions and disciplines in the context of the “ideas and institutions” in which they developed. If the way in which this setting of ideas in contexts was to be effected might not have been entirely clear from the programmatic essay in the inaugural volume (though jointly signed by Skinner, Jerome Schneewind, and Richard Rorty, it was, as Richard Fisher has recently explained, “largely written” by Rorty and “tonally rather different to much of what has followed”),4 such matters would be [End Page 678] clarified considerably by the second volume in the series, J. G. A. Pocock’s Virtue, Commerce, and History. Reviewing recent developments in the history of political thought, Pocock observed that the “history of thought (and even more sharply ‘of ideas’)” was being supplanted by a “history of speech” or a “history of discourse.”5 An overview of what such a history might look like quickly followed: The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, a volume tracing the various discourses in which political thought had been conducted from the Renaissance to the dawn of the nineteenth century.6 In his contribution to the volume, Pocock observed that the ability to say anything presupposed “a language to say it in,” which suggested that the relationship of ideas to contexts might be conceived along the lines of that between parole and langue.7 While the volumes that followed were not limited to products of what came to be called the “Cambridge School” (and while not all of those associated with the “Cambridge School” embraced the analogy Pocock was proposing), a concern with the discursive context in which arguments were conducted has implications for accounts of the Enlightenment. “Enlightenment” can be used both to designate a particular historical period (i.e., “the Enlightenment”) and to refer to a process (i.e., “enlightenment”) that, though associated with certain historical periods, is captive to none of them. Drawing out the implications of the “history of discourse” that Pocock, Skinner, and their colleagues were developing, “the Enlightenment”—as a discursive context in which things could be said (and, hence, done)—might be seen as a sort of langue, while “enlightenment” might be understood as encompassing a variety of activities, the bulk of them presumably occurring within the discursive context known as “the Enlightenment.” Thinking about the Enlightenment in this way stands in sharp contrast both to Ernst Cassirer’s attempt to grasp “its conceptual origins” and “underlying principle” and to Peter Gay’s identification of it with the “little flock of philosophes” who, though adhering to no single party line, nevertheless constituted the “party of humanity.”8 Against Cassirer (and, momentarily, in company with Gay), an attention to texts and discursive [End Page...