This chapter delves into the concept of legitimacy and introduces the readers to key debates on regulatory legitimacy. The concept of legitimacy has been extensively studied by scholars from various academic disciplines, including political theory, legal theory, political science, sociology and management studies. The resulting body of scholarship has, however, tended to remain in disciplinary siloes, making the study of legitimacy difficult to navigate. Chapter 11 offers first an exploration of different legitimacy claims that justify why individuals recognize an authority and its rules as legitimate. The chapter then moves to regulatory legitimacy.

During the 1750s and 60s, Rousseau formulated perhaps the most influential philosophical and political arguments for sentimentality and the tableau. Against the claim of early capitalist ideologues that society was no more than a rational balance of individuals’ material ‘interests’, Rousseau imagined the mythical origin of society as a theatrical scene or musical performance, in which self-regard or vanity (amour-propre) competed with sympathy and tenderness towards others. The balance between these could be tipped away from individualism through the persuasive power of sentimental music and drama, shaping public opinion by absorbing audiences in its affecting tableaux. This vision proved its political effectiveness in eighteenth-century opéra comique and nineteenth-century Romantic melodrama. On the other hand, Rousseau’s denial of rights over public sentimental feeling to women, though contested, in the long run weakened sentimentality by making it into a private, domestic commodity – as shown by the history of another genre Rousseau inaugurated, the romance.

Rhetoric was embedded in French Catholic education, and in revolutionary Paris rhetorical skills proved essential for any politician who wanted to command the assembly. Fabre d’Eglantine was an actor and director All expert in manipulating the political action behind-the-scenes. His play Philinte propounded Rousseau’s ideal that theatricality should be avoided in human life. Hérault de Séchelles by contrast drew on training by the classical actress Clairon to become a successful political orator, not ashamed to theorise the art of persuasion. The Marquis de Condorcet was a constitutional theorist who believed in truth, but lacked the performance skills to persuade others. The Comte de Mirabeau demonstrated outstanding skill as an orator and politician in the first years of the revolution, making no show of high personal morality, in contrast to Maximilien Robespierre who, partly in reaction, set himself up as a man of total sincerity. He bypassed the Assembly to control events through the more intimate forum of the Jacobin club. His sense of personal conviction owed much to Rousseau.

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.

Chapter 2 presents the conceptual transformation of republicanism that Rousseau operated while responding to Montesquieu’s challenges. In his writings, republicanism moved from an elitist theory based on virtuous self-sacrifice to an inclusive theory based on popular sovereignty and the rational interest of citizens. Rousseau developed a theory of republican citizenship as a shared intention toward creating and maintaining a community of free and equal beings—an inclusive theory of sharing freedom. Yet Rousseau’s theory has important shortcomings that plagued French republicanism after him. On the one hand, it presented a rational project of sharing equal freedom among all, but on the other, it emphasized particularism and nationalism as conditions of its realization.

Gary Jacobsohn’s theory of constitutional identity speaks to normative questions about the exercise of constituent power in constitution making. To gain purchase on these questions, this article applies Rousseau’s description of three "moments" of citizenship to the creation and maintenance of constitutional orders. Jacobsohn’s understanding of constitutional identity as something that emerges over time as opposed to an episodic expression enriches the Rousseauian model’s response to the paradoxes of democracy. Ultimately, Jacobsohn’s model implies that true constituent power is exercised only in the form of a dialogue within a shared understanding of democratic legitimacy, raising the possibility that moments of violent disruptive constitutional change cannot be accommodated to the requirements of democratic legitimacy at all – a return to Rousseau’s paradox of founding.

Percy Shelley has been a young man’s poet. Ever since Matthew Arnold dubbed his predecessor a “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain,” poets and critics would pit Shelley’s youthful radicalism against their own grown-up poetics and politics. T. S. Eliot would, for example, rhapsodize about his teenage years misspent idolizing the Romantic poet just to articulate his newfound modernism. Two hundred years later, we might amend the cliché to say that Percy Shelley is a young woman’s poet. His is the social media–savvy voice of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, dreaming of a Green New Deal and the systematic dismantling of institutional inequities; Arnold’s the establishment voice of Nancy Pelosi, chastising the beat of ineffectual wings. Because of this generational reading of Shelley, his last unfinished poem, The Triumph of Life, frequently sounds like a pessimistic turn from Promethean idealism toward Byronic cynicism, like youthful radicalism disappointed by unfulfilled promises. This chapter argues instead that the poem’s embodied contingencies of age, debility, and disability shape rather than frustrate Shelley’s developing idealism.

Property has a vexed status in Rousseau’s Social Contract. On one hand, Rousseau seems committed to the conventionalist view that property is a creation of law and state. Yet Rousseau also recognizes prepolitical dimensions of property, such as a right of first occupancy and a natural entitlement to land through “labor and cultivation.” This chapter contends that Rousseau’s seemingly divergent views on property become less paradoxical once one distinguishes between the rights of others and the more self-regarding aspects of morality. Focusing on the dense section of the Social Contract titled “Of Real Property,” it argues that while Rousseau acknowledges moral obligations governing the use of things, he ultimately holds that persons only have full-fledged property rights within the state. It suggests, moreover, that Rousseau’s attention to both the political and prepolitical dimensions of property continues to resonate in contemporary debate.

This chapter addresses Wollstonecraft’s engagement with narratives of property and property society in Smith and Rousseau, as reflected in her A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). In political economy’s imaginary, the figure of property encapsulates the ambivalences at the heart of late eighteenth-century modernity and poses questions of affective response and social relation which were fundamental to political economy’s account of social origin. Wollstonecraft’s attention to property of many kinds on her travels is read as an on-going critique of the contemporary political economic order, as well as attempts to imagine alternatives to it, such as the independent, comfortable existence suggested by the farmstead or cottage. Literary form emerges as a means through which questions of human personality and identity in commercial modernity might be framed, and as a means of insisting on ‘something’ more than the mediated social relations of market society’s ‘society of strangers’.

The reception of Sparta, especially the Three Hundred, through 18th-century France, 19th- 20th-century Germany, 19th-century America, the Second World War, the Cold War, and today. A considering of how Sparta’s own distortion of Thermopylae in antiquity has been amplified throughout the centuries to leave us with the legacy of Thermopylae as a war for freedom when at the time it was not framed in any such way.

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.

The topsy-turvy and complicated revolutionary politics of the late eighteenth century is nowhere better illustrated than in the history of Geneva. Intermittent popular rebellion erupted in 1707, the 1730s, the 1760s, the early 1780s and 1790s. This led to speculation about whether the Protestant Rome would meet its end through civil war. Alternatively, one of its rapacious and imperially-minded neighbors, the monarchies of France or Savoy, might devour the republic, ensuring that Geneva followed so many of the continent’s lesser states into oblivion. This chapter provides an overview of the history of Geneva and explains its role in the Age of Revolutions especially through the events of 1782, which saw a popular rebellion put down by invading troops from France, Savoy, and Bern. A significant exile diaspora followed. Some of the exiles who advocated republicanism at Geneva opposed it in France. Although revolution could be attempted at Geneva, this did not mean it would work elsewhere. The age of revolutions was full of fractures, with political stances complicated by the legacy of small state failure and the inability of revolutionaries to establish stable states capable of defending themselves militarily.

In describing the significance of the idea of popular sovereignty, Tocqueville alluded to its theological properties, indicating that its power relies at least in part on belief. Edmund S. Morgan declared, The success of government [...] requires the acceptance of fictions, requires the willing suspension of disbelief, requires us to believe that the emperor is clothed even though we can see that he is not. I trace the long lineage of these observations, focusing mainly on three formative moments. The first is Platos Republic, in which Socrates anticipates reason of state, by allowing rulers to lie, to protect the state. The second is Hobbess appeal to consider society as though it had emerged from a social contract, which shaped modern political thought from the seventeenth century to the present. The third is Rousseaus observation that the legislators work involves an undertaking that transcends human capacities and, to execute it, an authority that is nil, a problem that he proposed to solve by means of a civil religion. The continuing relevance of these observations not only poses important challenges, but also presents opportunities, for popular sovereignty.

The section’s final chapter examines the relation between philosophy, poetry, and criticism, revisiting a number of concepts introduced in previous chapters, including the development of a historical imagination and of organicist ideas of nature and culture, the new interest in aesthetics as a moral source, and the rise of sensibility as a challenge to disembodied reason. All of these contributed to a sense of crisis inherent to Enlightenment itself. It first reads the English poets Thomas Gray and Edward Young, traditionally seen as precursors of European Romanticism, alongside Kant’s First Critique to show how the philosopher sought to save reason from Hume’s scepticism by making it the product of a shared knowledge based on nature rather than book learning. the chapter then explains how the notion of ideas as historically and linguistically mediated emerged out of Vico, Rousseau, and Kant, giving particular attention to the Genevan philosopher’s social thought. The last part examines the Kant-Herder controversy, which brought to a crisis key tensions in late-Enlightenment culture between critical reason and a direct, lyrical insight into natural causality. The latter was dismissed by Kant as a dangerous form of ‘genius-cultism’ that lent itself to revolutionary fanaticism.

In addition to serving as instruments of pedagogy and moral instruction, commonplace books helped readers assert control over an ever-increasing quantity of printed material. During the eighteenth century, they were a perfect tool for making reading truly “useful.” Inherently idiosyncratic, the evidence from commonplace books is difficult to generalize; nevertheless, they capture the moment when readers appropriated Enlightenment ideas to address their own concerns. This chapter focuses on Thomas Thistlewood’s commonplace books to track his thinking about race and slavery as well as religion. Initially motivated by the need to learn about plantation management, his reading expanded from planters manuals to works that both promoted and challenged theories of racial difference, urged reform of the institution of slavery, and contained dire warnings of slave rebellions. Thistlewood’s readings on religion combined a deep skepticism of Christian orthodoxy with anxieties about divine justice and a search for personal transcendence, which culminated in his enthusiastic approval of the deism expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Savoyard vicar.

Recent scholarship has sought to read Smith in TMS as an ethical critic of market inequality, one motivated by egalitarian commitments. This chapter pushes back against this reading, arguing that the position Smith adopts in TMS is most accurately labelled sufficientarian, not egalitarian. However, Smith’s sufficientarian considerations are deliberately focused on what is most apt for securing individual happiness. He says little of direct or decisive bearing on the plausibility of egalitarianism as a political commitment. Yet because ethical questions are not, in this area at least, isomorphic with political ones, we ought not to assume the latter can straightforwardly be read off the former. This ought to temper both our reading of Smith’s argument, and what we can appropriately extract from his text for present normative debate.

In her chapter, Silvia Sebastiani treats Scottish Enlightenment thinking about the history of society as the product of a dialogue with natural history as well as moral philosophy. The key reference points were Buffon’s Natural History and Rousseau’s Discourse on inequality: from these the Scots derived two rival accounts of how natural man became historical. One conceived of history as the ‘progress of society’ through successive ‘stages’ of development, culminating in the attainment of ‘civilisation’. With contributions from David Hume, Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, this account was premised on the idea of a uniform human nature, but did not exclude the possibility of hierarchies between humans, and attached lesser value to forms of social organisation preceding civilisation. The alternative, explored at length by Lord Monboddo, a practising judge, took Rousseau’s assertion of the ‘perfectibility’ of man as an invitation to appreciate the variety of ways (physical as well as moral) in which humans might develop, and to accept that quite different outcomes were possible, corruption and decline as much as progress. There was no single Scottish conception of the ‘progress of society’, and the normative implications of stadial history were less uniformly positive than its later admirers have supposed.

No philosopher is more strongly associated with deontological ethics or is a more canonical modern moral philosopher than Immanuel Kant. In this chapter, we focus on Kant, though we begin, after a brief introduction of Kant and his historico-philosophical significance, with Rousseau. Rousseau is best known as a political philosopher, but there are elements of his thought that have great importance for moral philosophy and its history and, especially, for Kant. Kant credits Rousseau as the source of his signature claim of the equal dignity of rational persons. And Rousseau’s conception of political society as an “association” that “defend[s] and protect[s] the person and goods of each associate with the full common force,” but where each “nevertheless obey[s] only himself,” has obvious resonances with Kant’s “kingdom of ends” in which all are governed by self-legislated law. At the same time, Rousseau offers important points of contrast to Kant. Whereas Rousseau’s emphasis is essentially social and political, Kant will attempt to argue for morality as a common law binding all agents that is grounded in practical reason alone. Rousseau, by contrast, points toward an alternative grounding in sociability that is reminiscent more of Grotius, Pufendorf, Smith, and Reid.

This chapter discusses Herder’s Fragments: On Recent German Literature. In this work, Herder provided a comprehensive ‘patriotic’ assessment of the current situation of the German language and literature, including also excerpts from several smaller essays on the origins of poetry, language, and society. Previous scholarly discussions have mainly focused on Herder’s evolving historicism, aesthetics or philosophical hermeneutics as set out in these early essays. However, it is not sufficiently acknowledged that Herder’s theory of German linguistic and literary patriotism rested on a philosophical history of humanity, which he devised in dialogue with several other such histories. Engaging with Iselin’s and Goguet’s ideas, Herder sought to provide a response and alternative to Rousseau’s account of early human history. His own account closely paralleled that of John Brown. Both Brown and Herder traced all human culture and politics back to humans’ original creative agency, while Herder also drew rather optimistic conclusions from this. If it was the human capacity for poetry that demonstrated the dignity of human nature and had, from the earliest times, sustained human societies, one could hope that some form of poetry could also supply a remedy to the ‘current malaise of the world’.