This chapter focuses on critical concepts that underlie our conceptualization of public opinion, including the link between the public and those who govern, public opinion’s stability, opinion as an attitude, and convergence. Pollsters need to understand these concepts to do their job properly. This chapter seeks to answer the questions: Why is public opinion important? Is it stable? and What is the role of emotions in opinion formation?

This chapter considers how the exceptionalism of Western naturalism was given legitimacy through an appeal to narratives of progress. These narratives were indebted to a Protestant model that divided history into two periods—one in which miracles were genuine, followed by another in which they were not. The latter was associated with fraudulent Catholic miracles. Protestants also understood the Reformation as having ushered in an age of light after a period of medieval darkness. Eighteenth-century philosophes generalised and extended this argument, contending that the miracle reports from all historical periods were fraudulent. History could now be divided into an earlier period characterised by a naïve credulity in relation to miracle reports, followed by a more mature phase of history during which there was increasing recognition of the falsity of miracle reports. These same eighteenth-century thinkers also arrogated to themselves the mantle of enlightenment. The progressivist histories characteristic of the early social sciences and endorsed by advocates of scientific naturalism were doubly indebted to religious models since they also drew upon providential or eschatological notions of historical directionality. This raises the question of whether their progressivist philosophy of history is problematically dependent upon covert theistic assumptions.

Rousseau’s Social Contract begins with breathtakingly ambitious declarations about freedom and justice. Yet the project comes to an abrupt end, and the manuscript remains a fragment. Given that Rousseau sees daring arguments to their end elsewhere, why was this particular project – one so close to the core of his thought – abandoned? On the surface, the Social Contract appears beset by contradictions, but it pursues its conclusions toward an intricate and audacious coherence, giving an account of ancient political orders to overcome what Rousseau understands as misapprehensions associated with the Enlightenment. Yet it is not the Enlightenment, but Christianity that inaugurates the break with and confusions of ancient political distinctions. An attempt to confront this origin directly shatters Rousseau’s penultimately profound coherence. In remarkable congruence with patterns of figurative language developed in Descartes, Rousseau seeks to both ground and energize his account of political life by deploying diverse, often distinctly modern aspirations and metaphors in order to escape the Christian interruption of proper political ordering and concludes he cannot do so.

Chapter three analyses the period between 1650 and 1800. Many thinkers see The Enlightenment’ as intoxicated with ideas of reason, control and with building perfect knowledge, organizations and societies. I demonstrate that this view is exaggerated. The ravages of wars produced two opposed intellectual movements: on the one hand, natural law and rationalism whose adherents believed in certain knowledge and abstract schemes; on the other, thinking in terms of probabilities, which recognizes and accommodates uncertainty. Hume, Smith, Voltaire and Montesquieu saw the limits of human reason and foresight and made considerable room for uncertainty. Military thinkers cautioned that war is unpredictable and that systematic knowledge is a pipe dream. Uncertainty and unpredictability occupied the centre stage in European culture; in paintings, the picaresque novel and the popularity of gambling and betting. This era was much contested as three different world views established themselves: The idea that the world could be understood and predicted, the sense that it is entirely uncertain and a pragmatic world view that recognizes and accommodates uncertainty as a part of the world.

While the focus of the book is on the interstate use of force post-WWII, this chapter holds a rear mirror and offers a perspective of evolution of restraints that started long before states came into being. It recounts how human societies over the centuries became states free from widespread internal use of armed force and how great powers sought to avoid major armed conflicts through policies of balance of power and multilateral conferences. It describes how they developed common rules by concluding conventions and built institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations to create a rule-based order and mechanisms and methods to prevent the interstate use of force.

Taking off from an analysis of Mason & Dixon, Chapter 2 analyzes Pynchon’s depiction of how the basic impulses of modernity (the colonialist export of European capitalism and technological and scientific rationalism to the rest of the world) were established in earnest during the Enlightenment. Most critics primarily read Mason & Dixon as a story about America, but through analyses of, for instance, the prevalent theme of westering and the character Bonk, the chapter discusses the novel’s considerable attention to a global space. Furthermore, the chapter discusses Pynchon’s varied historical methods. His historiographical reflections are particularly evident in Mason & Dixon, and drawing on historical theories by Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Carlo Ginzburg, and Niall Ferguson, the chapter discusses how Pynchon in this and the two other global novels balances between immersive and distanced historical perspectives, and how he combines spatial and temporal forms of history writing.

Prior to Hegel’s portrayal of the French Revolution’s “fanaticism for destruction,” F. H. Jacobi criticized the impoverished, abstract conception of reason that he sees realized in the politics, philosophy, and broader intellectual culture of the era.Inaugurating a tradition of reflection in German thought, Jacobi labels this conception “nihilism.” While Jacobi identifies and analyzes both the theoretical and the practical sides of nihilism, its basic sense is practical.Practical nihilism equates ideal rationality with the realization of a pure form, minus the “way of sensing [Sinnesart]” that allows us to see what is at stake in any situation. Jacobi further argues that one’s “way of sensing” is the source of individuality and so of one’s irreplaceable value as a person. For Jacobi, the otherwise diverse group including the French philosophes, Kant, and Fichte all exemplify practical nihilism in some manner or other.This account starts from Jacobi’s initial reactions to the French Revolution, eventually captured by the letter “To Erhard O.” (1792). This discussion establishes the core of Jacobi’s objection to his era’s dominant conception of rationality.The open letter “To Fichte” (1799) in which the charge of nihilism first appears is explicable against this decades-old concern on Jacobi’s part.

Millán Brusslan focusses upon what was unique about Schlegel’s philosophical lens, a lens uniquely suited to capturing social injustice. She undertakes an examination of the roots of Schlegel’s philosophical pluralism and his project of blending philosophy and poetry. She argues that Schlegel’s push to blend disciplines was part of a project to reform our approach to truth, a topic explored in Sections One and Two of the paper.The new philosophical lens developed by Schlegel allowed him to see what other thinkers overlooked and to address urgent social issues that needed attention, especially the exclusion of women from philosophy.The reforming spirit of Schlegel’s thought is most systematically developed in an essay on Kant’s Perpetual Peace, and so in Sections Three and Four of the paper, Kant’s essay and Schlegel’s critique of it are analyzed to highlight the political implications of Schlegel’s thought.

This chapter examines the reception of Augustine’s “Confessions” in the Enlightenment through three major lexicographical works: Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary; Chevalier de Jaucourt’s entry in the Encyclopédie, “Church Fathers”; and Voltaire’s Questions on the Encyclopedia. All of them deliberately misappropriate Augustine's account of his life as a sinner in order to undermine aspects of his theology, and, by extension, the theology of Jansenism in their own era.