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.

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’.

Two early essays from the year 1765 set the scene for Herder’s lifelong engagement with the topic of patriotism. Both are focused on the question of modern patriotism. Reading them side-by-side one is nevertheless struck by their contrasting tenor. An earlier unfinished essay, How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People, is highly critical of modern society and politics, while Do We Still Have the Public and Fatherland of the Ancients celebrates modern developments, including luxury and modern freedom. In an effort to explain these differences, this chapter argues that these essays represent an important intersection between two kinds of debates on Rousseau’s moral and political thought in German-speaking countries. Herder entered the debate as a self-avowed ‘Rousseauian’, while he soon also became aware of economic and political debates that were originally shaped by Montesquieu. In these debates, Rousseau had come to be seen as a defender of austere democratic republicanism modelled on early Greek societies. This was not the Rousseau Herder wished to associate himself with. The second essay is thus replete with implicit references to Abbt, Hume and Hamann. The same orientation was shared by the local elites in Riga.

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.

In the last decades, scholars have carved out Herder’s original and interconnected ideas about epistemology, metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, language, and aesthetics, situating his thinking in various strands of Enlightenment philosophy, natural history and hermeneutics. Several recent studies have also dissected Herder’s moral and political ideas. However, Herder’s views on modern European politics and the evolution of his political thought have remained largely unexplored. In particular, his self-avowed ‘German patriotism has not been studied at any depth. At the same time, a debate on Herder’s relationship to nationalism still lingers on. This study proposes that reconstructing Herder’s serial contributions to eighteenth-century discussions on the moral psychological foundations of, and the possible reforms in, modern societies provides a key to understanding the evolution of his political thought, including his relationship to nationalism. In engaging with thinkers such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, Möser, Ferguson, and Kant, Herder addressed questions on how to close the gap between moral principles and action, as well as law and ethics, in contemporary societies.

In Chapter 1, I read the first two acts of Byron’s Swiss lyrical drama, Manfred, as an allegory of the above passage from “ancient” to “modern” liberty, showing how Romantic-period writers could represent the Swiss myth both sympathetically and skeptically in order to maintain a link between classical republicanism and liberalism. Byron’s sympathetic portrait of the chamois hunter, in particular, offers one of the last radical interpretations of Swiss-style republicanism. I then review the historical and ideological origins of the Swiss myth in Switzerland itself, going back to the Renaissance but focusing on eighteenth-century writers whose ideal of a free and happy alpine republic I contrast with the Old Confederacy’s historical realities. While the Swiss myth could express a range of ideological positions before the French Revolution, I show how post-revolutionary authors such as Staël and Karl Ludwig von Haller helped crystallize it as an expression of customary Freiheit rather than of rational liberté.

Many scholars and critics have maintained that Tolstoy, while a great writer, is a poor thinker, a mere amateur in philosophy. My chapter suggests that this venerable cliché of Tolstoy reception is untenable. The chapter has two parts. In the first, I discuss several philosophers with whose thinking Tolstoy engaged extensively and give a brief account of his relation to them. The main names here are well known: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Immanuel Kant. In the second part, I examine a somewhat unexpected but significant affinity Tolstoy’s fiction has with the thought of Baruch Spinoza. This affinity emerges most clearly in War and Peace. Although this section covers what is merely an affinity, it aims to show that Tolstoy’s greatest fictional work is one of the supreme artistic instantiations of an essentially Spinozist account of the world.

The introduction argues for a relation between the Swiss myth, Romanticism, and the development of modern liberalism. I notably explain and define the terms used in the book, including negative versus positive liberty, republicanism versus liberalism, and Ancient versus Modern liberty. This brings me to a more detailed discussion of the concepts of liberty, popular sovereignty, and representation in the writings of liberal Swiss intellectuals Benjamin Constant, Germaine de Stäel, and, more briefly, Rousseau. His Letters Written from the Mountain, published half-a-century before Constant’s famous speech, already accepts the passing away of Ancient Liberty, and embraces a modern, representative system in which private virtues supersede public ones and not everyone can participate in the res publica. The Genevan Citizen’s demystification of his own native republic and of Swiss republicanism in general attests to the constructed, ideologically-marked nature of the representations that I explore in the rest of this book. The fact that readers and writers wanted to continue believing in Rousseau’s community of equals in the Alps long after he had stopped doing so speaks to the strength of this Romantic desire, and to the lasting power of the Swiss myth.

The chapter asks why an avowed pacifist wrote so many works, not all completely negative, about war. It begins with Tolstoy’s personal connection to the military, through both his family background and his own service. It describes the two wars in which he fought: the Long Caucasian War (1817–64) and the Crimean War of 1853–6, and it explains how he came to write War and Peace about the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century. It then turns to other conflicts (the 1877–8 Russo-Turkish War and the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War) and military alliances (among others, the 1891–1917 Franco-Russian Alliance) in which Russia was involved during Tolstoy’s lifetime. Russia had been an empire since the conquest of Kazan in 1552, and all its external wars during Tolstoy’s lifetime were related to imperialism. Tensions with Germany simmered over many years. Finally, the failure after emancipation in 1861 to integrate the peasants into a new, just society created conditions for civil war that intensified in the late 1870s and led to the assassination, in 1881, of Alexander II and the revolution of 1905. The essay summarizes Tolstoy’s reactions to all these different kinds of war and warlike conditions.

Why should the Constitution be considered authoritative and demand our loyalty? The answer to this question is tightly bound up with how we think about popular sovereignty. Crucially, the American colonists reaffirmed the rule of law over the rule of will, whether as it had been theorized both by partisans of absolutist monarchy (e.g., Filmer) or partisans of absolutist democracy (e.g., Rousseau). To understand the Founders’ perspective on popular sovereignty under the rule of law, we contrast it with Rousseau's voluntarist and positivist account and engage with recent scholarship in consitutional theory on popular sovereignty. The chapter then reconstructs the founders' account of sovereignty taking inspiration from Orestes Brownson.

The intellectual excitement of nineteenth-century Germany was reflected by the Romantic and Existential movements, although both had international aspects as well. Both movements were to some extent reactions against the dominant idealism of rationalism, coming primarily from Kant’s views on the active mind, constructing reality. Fichte, von Schelling, and Hegel explored the implication of Kant’s philosophy, with Hegel coming to dominate the age. Romanticism found its roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and exerted tremendous influence in art, literature as well as philosophy, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century. Recognizing the complexities of human experience, particularly in the dimensions of emotions, passions and desires, romanticism explored those aspects not readily explained by rational, intellectual processes. Existentialism was a direct reaction against rationalism and found initial expression in the nineteenth century by Kierkegaard, in Theology, and Dilthey, in psychology. Further, the Kantian notions of the strivings of the will and the unconscious were explored more fully by Schopenhauer and von Hartmann.

The Philosophy of History’s search for a renewed sense wholeness originated in the paradoxes of Rousseau. He detested modern liberalism for producing the materialistic “bourgeois.” He wanted to restore the ancient concern with civic virtue and happiness to counteract this spiritual debasement. But because Rousseau accepted the modern account of nature as matter in motion, yielding appetitive individualism and identifying reason with utility, he could only promote the nobler dimension of human life as the freedom of will to oppose oneself to nature and reason altogether. This created a contradiction between nature and freedom, and undermined political authority by suggesting that no form of government could return us to our original natural happiness in a lost Golden Age, corrupted as we are by the progress of civilization. The Jacobins took this as a call to collectivist revolution and the return to “the Year One.” Alternatively, Rousseau extolled the Romantic notion of the solitary artist who seeks his happiness outside of civil society. These explosive tensions between natural happiness and political authority were grappled with by Rousseau’s successors, who sought ways of healing the division in man between his natural self and his free self.