This chapter examines a core hypothesis of the intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck: that modern political concepts underwent an accelerated period of change during the latter half of the eigheenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, a period he calls the ‘Sattelzeit’ or hinge period of intellectual history. Adapting word embedding models and metrics of novelty and the pace of change, this chapter helps to measure, visualise and disentangle the precise semantic transformations occuring at this threshold period: the consolidation of Koselleck’s ‘collective singular’ noun, for example, appears alongside a host of other cultural, technological, intellectual innovations in word usage. Finally, the data reveal not one but two revolutionary semantic periods between 1720 and 1960, a finding which both troubles the concept of a Sattelzeit while also extending it into new discursive, historical – and digital – contexts.

Chapter Eight revisits several of the same authors and texts as in the previous chapter, but focusses on the complex relation between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, looking at how the modern concept of citizenship emerged in this period as a bridge between Enlightenment and Romantic values. The first par discusses the origins and theoretical foundations of cosmopolitanism, including the notions of Humanität, republicanism, and national culture in works by Kant, Schlegel, and Herder. It then turns to two texts on education written in response to the Revolution by Schiller and Fichte. The latter combines Romantic nationalism with Enlightenment cosmopolitanism in an effort to first liberate the individual nation, then, through moral education, humanity as a whole. In the last part, the author presents three case studies of lived Romantic cosmopolitanism, in which the above ideals are enacted. These include an abolitionist slave narrative by Olaudah Equiano; the Franco-British poet and writer Helen Maria Williams’s radical repo+L22rting from Revolutionary Paris; and German poet and patriot Karl Follen’s early nationalist and later internationalist writing in exile.

Virtue ethics has been a key concern of some important modern thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Anthropologists have disagreed strongly over whether the categories developed by such writers are useful or a source of ethnocentric distortion when applied to ethnographic and comparative work. This chapter argues for a middle course. Virtue seems to be a universal concern, but in order to understand it cross-culturally it will be necessary to develop a ‘virtue ethics as such’: an understanding that transcends the culture-bound assumptions of modern virtue ethicists. At the same time, those thinkers were concerned to escape from certain limited ways of thinking about ethics that have also stunted anthropological work on morality, so they may provide a uniquely useful starting point for our investigations. Having set this challenge, the chapter goes on to provide some preliminary thoughts on how an anthropology of virtue ethics as such could be pursued, considering concepts such as ‘exemplarity’ and ‘the fragility of the good’ from a comparative point of view, drawing on Confucian, Buddhist, and other traditions.

Chapter 3 explores the genre of travel writing to illustrate the transformation of the Swiss myth from a progressive to a more conservative narrative. After briefly reviewing the Whig ideology of the Grand Tour, I look at how William Coxe’s various editions of his Sketches of Swisserland responded to two French translations by the republican writers Louis Ramond de Carbonnières and Théophile Mandar, and to a competing travelogue by the radical British expatriate Helen Maria Williams, all of whom struggled to redefine the meaning of republicanism. I argue that these three works exploited the contradictions in Coxe’s text in order to modernize his Whiggish ideal of liberty, and in Williams’s travelogue at least, to make the case for revolution in Switzerland. Centering my analysis on the aristocratic republic of Bern and on the rural democracies of central Switzerland, I look at the various textual strategies that enabled these writers to make Swiss liberty a Whig, then radical, and finally Tory political trope.