Download or read book Cruel Delight written by James A Steintrager and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-29 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cruel Investigation investigates the fascination with joyful malice in 18th-century Europe and how this obsession helped inform the very meaning of humanity. James A. Steintrager reveals how the understanding of cruelty moved from an inexplicable, apparently paradoxical "inhuman" pleasure in the misfortune of others to an eminently human trait stemming from will and freedom