![]() Huxley, argued the other side of the coin. While many found it convenient to manipulate evolutionary theories in order to justify aggressive conduct at home and abroad, others, including Darwin's most authoritative interpreter, Thomas H. While majorities clung to the death penalty or the right to mete out corporal punishment, an increasingly vocal minority attacked these time-honored forms of aggression and denounced them as pathological. What makes Peter Gay's Victorian bourgeois so fascinating is that they debated everything - quite aggressively. But they also sought civilized rationales for their conduct, whether in the hunt for profits from new commercial ventures or for power in the political arena or for dominance over new movements that were bringing women out from domesticity.But that is only part of the story. ![]() ![]() The Victorians, like members of other cultures, gave themselves permission to ridicule, bully, patronize, and exploit individuals and classes, races and nations they deemed to be inferior. For nearly a hundred years, aggression had lurked beneath the surface of bourgeois culture, emerging occasionally to split the social order into insiders and outsiders. ![]() "War," exclaimed Thomas Mann as the European powder keg exploded in 1914, "is purification, liberation, and an enormous hope." His was not the only voice edged with eagerness for battle. ![]()
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