Chapter 27 emphasises the importance of French sources in shaping Goethe’s thinking on all fronts. The formative role of French began in his early years, owing not least to the French occupation of Frankfurt, evolved during his time as a student in Leipzig and Strasbourg, and was supported throughout Goethe’s adult life by his voracious reading. The chapter considers Goethe’s attitude, by turns admiring and ambivalent, to the Enlightenment philosophes, Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, and highlights the significance of the liberal journal Le Globe for Goethe towards the end of his life.

This essay addresses the perennial question of the relations between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. It starts with an attempt to fix the place of both the intellectual movement and the political upheaval within the wider currents of Atlantic history, highlighting the long-term transition to capitalism in Europe and the inter-imperial conflicts that accompanied it. A closer look at the French Enlightenment, in the next section, offers reasons for skepticism about the claim, associated with the work of Jonathan Israel, that in “radical” guise, the Enlightenment somehow “caused” the Revolution. On the contrary, the third part argues, it makes more sense to see the Revolution as having permitted a striking radicalization of Enlightenment ideas and aims, which remain central to any explanation of the way in which the Atlantic revolutions as a whole unfolded. A conclusion then returns to the ways in which the Enlightenment and the French Revolution have remained inextricably linked to one another, within the modern historiographical and philosophical imaginary.

By no means has it always been the case that European readers have always believed, as did Voltaire, that the main purpose of Herodotus’ Histories was to tell the story of the clash of eastern and western ‘civilizations’.Indeed, from at least the later seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, the first four books of the Histories were widely used by Christian scholars to verify sacred history with profane data.For this very large scholarly faction, Herodotus offered the earliest, and most checkable, ‘oriental’ facts, useful in combatting rationalist and pyrrhonist arguments about the untrustworthiness of ancient histories that could not be otherwise verified.Only in the later nineteenth century, when decipherments and excavations began to provide more direct and concrete testimony of the probable historical accuracy of the Hebrew Bible did Herodotus begin to lose his function as, in the words of one eighteenth-century Jesuit advocate, ‘historian of the Hebrew people, without knowing it’.

During its short publishing life, the Iris Américaine proposed a complement to the enlightened White male American citizen promoted by Saint-Domingue’s other two periodicals, the Affiches Américaines and the Journal de Saint-Domingue. After summarizing the contributions of the Affiches and the Journal to the island’s cultural life and discussing the importance of “taste” in French cultural life, the chapter documents how the Iris honored the age-old dictum “to instruct and delight” by publishing a mix of diverting poetry, short stories, and nonfiction essays. Yet its content, however light, had the serious intent of tutoring White women in good taste—both for their own good and to civilize their men by transforming unruly passions into refined pleasures. While these objectives were framed in a metropolitan terms, they assumed special urgency in a society infamous for racial brutality and “disordered” sexuality. Thus, the Iris spoke to deep social anxieties and threatening realities: the failure to establish a stable, White population; the ubiquitous concubinage of enslaved Black women and free women of color; the consequent increase in the number of mixed-race people; and the fact that White colonists were vastly outnumbered by enslaved Black people.

This chapter juxtaposes This Too a Philosophy of History with Herder’s treatises On the Origin of Language and On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul to specify the specific targets and the theoretical foundations of his radical criticisms directed at European societies and morality in the 1770s. It also explores his alternative account of moral psychology and modern moral virtue. A fundamental continuity exists between Herder’s writings of the 1760s and the Treatise as far as Herder’s views on human nature, morality, and sociability are concerned. The significant changes include Herder’s embrace of Ferguson’s account of the unsocial sociability of tribal groups, and his claim that Providence had foreseen that mankind would be reunified at a higher mental level thanks to the process of Bildung. Herder’s ridicule of modern liberty, ‘love of mankind’ and linear moral progress in This Too should not be seen as a full-scale rejection of these values; rather, he cautioned against modern self-complacency and ethical and political blind spots. In This Too, Herder emphatically drew attention to historical forms of human sociability, whilst he in On the Cognition highlighted human freedom and self-determination as the core of Christian virtue.

This chapter examines the impact of experimental philosophy in France from the mid-1730s through to the period in which the philosophes were at the forefront of French intellectual life, the period normally called the French Enlightenment. The chapter opens with a discussion of the reception of Bacon’s views about natural history and the acceptance of experimental philosophy more generally in the early Parisian Academy. It then turns to the heyday of experimental philosophy in France which began in the mid-1730s with its promotion by the likes of Voltaire and Comte de Buffon, and the courses in experimental philosophy taught by Abbé Nollet. It is argued that the anti-speculative sentiment so prevalent in Britain manifests itself in the anti-system debate in France. And the chapter goes on to examine the alignment between Buffon’s conception of natural history and that of Bacon, the Baconianism of Denis Diderot, and the influence of experimental philosophy on Jean Le Rond d’Alembert as manifest in his ‘Preliminary Discourse’ to the Encyclopédie. The chapter concludes with an appraisal of the rehabilitation of Descartes, who up to that point had come to be regarded by many as the archetypal speculative philosopher.

This chapter notes how ancient societies used capital punishment, highlighting methods of execution and various legal codes (e.g., Draco's Code and the Code of Hammurabi) authorizing executions. The chapter discusses the "divine right of kings," corporal punishments used in prior centuries, and the lex talionis doctrine. It also highlights how punishment practices were tied to religious and societial beliefs, including interpretation of religious texts. The chapter traces the change in the law from the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment, taking note of how judicial torture--a practice associated with contintental European civil law systems--was outlawed in certain locales in the eighteenth century even as harsh systems of punishment (e.g., the English "Bloody Code") persisted. The chapter also describes the Enlightenment thinkers--John Bellers, George Fox, William Penn, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Frederick II, Cesare Beccaria, and William Blackstone--who critiqued torture and capital punishment or called for the death penalty's abolition or curtailment. The chapter describes the death penalty's abolition in Tuscany (1786) and Austria (1787) and how the Enlightenment shaped the law.

Despite their aspirations to shine the light of reason on the world, and with notable exceptions, the thinkers of the Enlightenment provided posterity with numerous indictments of the Jewish character and religion. How much of an influence the writings of such figures as Voltaire and Kant had on the subsequent evolution of antisemitism remains a subject of scholarly debate.

Enlightenment thinkers rarely used the word “consumption,” but they spoke incessantly of “luxury,” a multivalent term that became the principal idiom through which writers discussed the moral, social, and political implications of consumption. Controversy over luxury was a proxy for the first modern debate on consumption. The discussion of luxury shifted decisively at the turn of the eighteenth century, when two writers – François Fénelon and Bernard Mandeville – laid the foundations for a vigorous Enlightenment debate. Drawing on ancient and medieval critiques, Fénelon argued that luxury corrupted morals, scrambled the social order, and destroyed states. Mandeville countered by advancing a bold apology for luxury. Far from weakening states, he argued, luxury generated prosperous and powerful nations. Gender would play a key role in the debate that ensued. Whereas critics of luxury like Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned that excessive consumption effeminized men, rendering them unfit for public service, defenders of luxury like David Hume claimed that material well-being was the sign of a civilized society in which men and women frequently interacted. In the second half of the eighteenth century, certain thinkers sought to resolve the debate. Political economists argued that if consumption was directed toward productive ends, wealthy and powerful nations would avoid corruption and endure. Meanwhile, luxury producers incorporated critiques of luxury by designing natural and healthy products. Criticism of luxury did little to slow the pace of consumption.

This chapter begins by demonstrating that an attention to transition was a key element in some prominent literary critical writing of the later eighteenth century. I then argue that, within such writing, the understanding of transition evolves from that explored in my earlier chapters. Borrowing a term that Elizabeth Montagu, William Richardson, and their contemporaries make frequent use of, one might call this evolution a shift from dramatic transition to ‘dramatic character’. Montagu does this as she argues for the moral impact of Shakespeare’s incessantly enthralling dramatic characters, and Richardson when he claims that Shakespeare’s dramatic characters are such perfect imitations of life that their passions and transitions might serve as the subjects of philosophical enquiry into human nature. I use Maurice Morgann’s Essay on the Dramatic Character of Falstaff (1777) and David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1740) to illuminate the tensions inherent in such a critical standpoint, as efforts to explain moments of spectacular dramatic transition in terms of a character's stable identity risk minimising the spectacle that invited such explanation in the first place.

This chapter traces the fortunes of Aaron Hill’s English translation (1735) of Voltaire’s tragedy Zaïre (1732), from its first performance under Hill’s direction outside the patent theatres to David Garrick’s reworking of it at Drury Lane. I show that Zara’s scepticism of established religion and her father’s deathbed proselytising are used by Hill to produce what his friend John Dennis called an ‘enthusiastic’ passion and suggest that Voltaire’s work appealed to Hill for its handling of religious material capable of producing extreme sequences of sublime emotions. At the same time, Hill’s Zara is also an exposition of what Hill described as ‘dramatic passions’. Those who read, saw, or performed Zara could witness the outward marks of many passions and trace on stage and on the page their performance through transition to the very instant. Such opportunities made the play perfect for what Hill called an ‘Experiment’ on English tastes and acting. When Garrick came to revive this experiment in the 1750s, its passions become the property of Garrick himself, as he rewrote sections of the play to favour his character of Lusignan.

The Epilogue reflects upon the meaning of history in the light of the presence of evil within it. It examines religious providence, secular progress, cosmic nihilism, and apocalypticism as potential solutions to the problem of meaning in history. It ends with a reflection on ethical eschatology at the personal level.