Peter Gay - Scholarship

Scholarship

According to the American Historical Association's Award Citation, Gay's range of "scholarly achievements is truly remarkable". His 1959 book, Voltaire's Politics examined Voltaire as a politician and how his politics influenced the ideas that Voltaire championed in his writings. Gay followed the success of Voltaire's Politics with a wider history of the Enlightenment, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966, 1969, 1973), whose first volume won the 1967 U.S. National Book Award in History and Biography

Gay's 1968 book, Weimar Culture was considered at the time to be a ground-breaking cultural history of the Weimar Republic. Starting in 1978 with Freud, Jews and Other Germans, an examination of the impact of Freudian ideas on German culture, Gay has become increasingly interested in psychology. Many of his works focus on the social impact of psychoanalysis. For example, he wrote A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis where he wrote about Freud's atheism and how in his view Freud's ability to develop psychoanalysis was due to his atheism. Gay is a leading champion of Psychohistory and an admirer of Sigmund Freud. He has written history books which apply Freud's theories to history, for example The Bourgeois Experience:from Victoria to Freud. He also edited a collection of Freud's writings called The Freud Reader.

De Dijn argues that Gay, in The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966), first formulated the interpretation that the Enlightenment brought political modernization to the West, in terms of introducing democratic values and institutions and the creation of modern, liberal democracies. While the thesis has many critics it has been widely accepted by Anglophone scholars and has been reinforced by the large-scale studies by Robert Darnton, Roy Porter and most recently by Jonathan Israel.