SOURCE: Annan, Noel. “The Age of Aggression.” New York Review of Books 41, no. 1–2 (13 January 1994): 42–44.

In the following excerpt, Annan questions the value of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume III: The Cultivation of Hatred as a work of historical scholarship.

Was the nineteenth-century bourgeois citizen a staid, buttoned-up, law-abiding creature? Not according to Peter Gay [in The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume III: The Cultivation of Hatred]. One emotion above all others, he claims, governed the behavior of the middle classes in America, Britain, France, and Germany: aggression. Whether it was politics, trade, competition in industry, snobbery, boasting, self-advertisement, or gossip, the object was to score off one's adversary and put him down. The thwarted felt frustrated and worked it off in further aggression. Even those who did not express aggression in their actions felt it in their hearts; and it spilled over into their diaries...