Hugo Grotius is best known as one of the originators of international law. Philosophers of the period also saw him as making a fundamental break with ancient philosophy and Thomistic classical natural law deriving from Aristotle. Grotius carried forward an important distinction made by Francisco Suarez between “law” and “counsel.” Good moral reasons may counsel action without yet requiring it. Law, by contrast, obligates, and obligation is conceptually related to accountability. It concerns what we would be blameworthy for failing to do without excuse. Grotius develops a theory of natural rights and law and sets the philosophical agenda by asking what could ground such a law (Anscombe’s Challenge). His response is human “sociability,” by which he means not simply any desire to affiliate, but the drive to live with others on terms of mutual accountability.

In this chapter, we review the work that has been done on children’s temperament and prosocial behavior in childhood and adolescence, highlighting the importance of taking a nuanced and multidimensional approach to examining the links between temperament and children’s prosocial behavior. Thus, in addition to examining the higher-order temperamental factors (such as negative emotionality), we also examine how the specific dimensions of temperament (e.g., anger proneness) predict different types of prosocial behaviors (e.g., sharing). Finally, we consider how the links between prosocial behaviors and temperament are likely complicated by the fact that temperamental variables interact both with each other and with environmental factors, such as parenting, to predict different types of prosocial behaviors.

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.

Lionel Johnson is more famous now for his life (and death) than his work – for his alcoholism and insomnia, conversion to Catholicism, erroneous claims to Irish heritage, and death by severe brain haemorrhage at the age of thirty-five. As a founding member of the Rhymers’ Club and contributor to the notorious Yellow Book, he is frequently referred to as a major figure of British Decadence, but his work is rarely considered in any detail. This chapter looks at Johnson’s criticism, poetry, and letters as expressive of a religious humanism heavily influenced by Pater’s sensuously continent aestheticism. No one was more excited by the world than Johnson, by the crowds of London as much as by the wonders of nature, and the continence he described was hardly a cloistered retreat. But sex was at the heart of what he saw as wrong in the modern world: its lack of respect for tradition; its bad manners; the haste that led people to look to their own uncultivated selves for a guide to right and wrong. Like Pater, Johnson portrayed continence as a sociable practice, leading to better relationships with people, objects, and the past.

The late 1950s saw a certain internationalisation of anticolonial campaigns in sub-Saharan Africa, following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and the independence of Sudan and Ghana in 1955–1958. Chapter 3 asks how this cohort pursued strategies to hold newly independent states accountable to promises of anticolonial patronage, in the lead up to the famous All-African Peoples Conference (AAPC) in December 1958 in Accra. This chapter visits five moments obscured in the AAPC’s shadows: Munu Sipalo’s attendance at the Asian Socialist Conference in Bombay; John Kale’s publishing from his Cairo office; the first Pan-African Students Conference at Makerere; Abu Mayanja’s founding of the Committee of African Organisations in London; Kanyama Chiume’s role in the formation of the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa at Mwanza. Activists continued to think through a regional-generational lens: their activities highlight previously unexplored tensions in the Afro-Asian and pan-African movement and recast factions in the nationalist parties of these four countries. The AAPC was never simply a galvanising force for East and Central African activists.

Pufendorf’s reception and impact are not without paradox. Together with Grotius his name became a byword for natural law in his lifetime and has remained so. He was the key figure in the institutionalisation of natural law as an academic subject with wide-ranging extra-academic effect. Yet, his views were so widely and deeply contested from their publication that their original meaning and function mostly were lost sight of. Consequently, he has been subjected to a range of teleological interpretations that have persisted into contemporary scholarship, the most prominent being to see him as a proto-Enlightenment theorist of sociability and stadial history. His broad basis in erudite humanist scholarship was lost sight of, his ideas on constitutional law, ecclesiology and theology, and historiography being parcelled up along disciplinary lines. The effect was a narrowing of his legacy and with it the discipline of natural law in both moral philosophy and jurisprudence. This was despite his main commentator, Barbeyrac, himself being one of the last humanist scholars in natural law. The chapter discusses a range of the contestations about Pufendorf, including the remarkable contribution of Samuel Cocceji.

This chapter examines Varro’s depictions of teasing and banter in his dialogue De Re Rustica, with particular reference to issues of im/politeness. In many cases, this banter involves some kind of provocation of the addressee, and so risks being construed as impolite. In most instances, however, the witty phrasing conveys a playful intent, which ensures that the remark does not cause offence. The end result is usually heightened rapport among the participants. In several cases Varro’s teasing involves ‘collaborative’ banter, in which both participants contribute to the construction of a playful conceit. In other instances, however, the teasing quips are one-sided, with no response reported. In such cases the emphasis seems to be on the display of quick-witted inventiveness for its own sake. This energetic interaction differs from the highly conventionalized language of social negotiation typically used by the Roman elite. Indeed, it is significant that Cicero’s real-life epistolary relationship with Varro was marked by a degree of formality that eschewed the use of banter. In this respect, the right to tease was one extended only to a privileged sub-set of personal acquaintances

Recent scholarship in the history of emotions encourages us to think about the ways war-time Americans managed their feelings. Separation of families fostered loneliness, for example, the tedium of camp life brought on boredom, the delays of news from home or from camp occasioned anxiety, and the uncertainty of the war’s outcome eroded confidence. Reading, this chapter argues, became a deliberate strategy to mitigate these corrosive effects of warfare. By looking at Civil War–era reading practices we can see how readers engaged imaginative literature and other genres popular in the mid-nineteenth century to maintain the ties that bind. Epistolary conversations about books allowed those separated by war to approximate shared reading, a common practice in antebellum America. And they allowed readers to express emotions by proxy, using fictional characters and imagined scenarios to voice their thoughts and invite reassurance. Fundamentally, reading reminded readers they were not alone.

Chapter 5 looks at the social dynamics of inter-confessional relations after 1689. Taking up the recent work of historians of sociability, it questions whether the emphasis on neighbourliness common to many studies of inter-confessional relations is the most productive approach. Instead, it examines the different ways in which Dissenters described their 'neighbours', 'friends', and 'company' in relation to one another, using this as a means to understand the extent to which all types of Protestant Dissenters excluded themselves from society. It demonstrates that looking at other ways of describing sociability in addition to the language of neighbourliness provides a much broader view of the different levels and boundaries of inter-confessional social interaction. In particular, it emphasises that the way contemporaries mentally framed different types of social relationship may have helped them to navigate contradictory impulses to foster both group identity and integration with others after 1689.

Religious differences also shaped the voluntary social interactions that formed the basis of the burgeoning culture of eighteenth-century England. Chapter 4 looks at some of these practices – drinking, dancing, and coffeehouse culture – through the lens of Dissenting engagement with them in a context of continuing religious stereotyping. Although Dissenters were not excluded from the social practices of the eighteenth century, religious affiliation was an important determinant of how contemporaries interpreted their own, and others’, social interactions. Looking at Dissenters’ differing engagements with contemporary culture, and how others reacted to them, helps us to recognise the diverse ways in which contemporaries could make meaning from the common cultural modes and spaces of eighteenth-century England. This approach not only encourages a more expansive understanding of the varieties of cultural interaction in eighteenth-century England, but also highlights some of the crucial ways in which awareness of religious differences shaped social and cultural behaviour.

In the German-speaking territories of eighteenth-century Europe, Musenhof courts were sites where rulers surrounded themselves with artists and intellectuals, writers and musicians. They were a conspicuous feature of geopolitical environments where smaller courts and principalities were being fashioned into the larger cultural units of the Holy Roman Empire and Brandenburg-Prussia (later the Kingdom of Prussia). Though aristocratic in inception and genesis, Musenhof courts functioned as bridges and brokers for diverse artistic, social, and literary networks across the German-speaking world. They provided a permeable environment where overlapping social networks straddled the court and the public sphere.

This chapter juxtaposes three contrasting Musenhof courts in order to highlight their contribution as sites for cultural brokering in their regions. It considers three different models of the Musenhof, located in Weimar, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach; Königsberg, East Prussia; and the Duchy of Kurland, hosted by Anna Amalia (1739–1807), Charlotte Caroline Amalia von Keyserling(k) (1727–1791), and Dorothea von Kurland (1761–1821). Through comparison, it charts a paradigm shift in the history of the Musenhof from aristocratic spaces of (cosmopolitan) sociability and patronage to exempla for socio-political and economic reforms.

This chapter lays out the vibrant social networks and rich cultural activities of the elite residents of Ichijōdani, pushing back against the derivative claim that provincial capitals were mere “Little Kyotos.”

The Introduction examines the process of “sympathetic collaboration” – drawing from manuscript marginalia, notes, journal/diary entries, and correspondence – and the influences of that process on poetry, drama, and fiction. Guided by the current trend of literary studies around sympathy, emotion, and affect, it demonstrates the long reach that eighteenth-century moral philosophy has on later literature and artistic thought by investigating the writing and creative processes to understand the ways in which communal relationships are inscribed within the literary product. Collaboration is necessarily rooted in the ideals of Victorian liberalism: It is derived from a representation of sympathetic identification and emphasizes human sociability. In a broader sense, this book provides a fresh understanding of literary collaboration necessarily informed by the mechanics of the writing process and illustrated in the formal elements of literature, as well as textual or marginal traces within the manuscripts. Nineteenth-century artistic creation is, I propose, rooted in sympathetic identification. This philosophical approach to life (seen in the lived attempts at community for each of my case studies) has larger implications for literary history: I suggest that these sympathetic communities are mutually implicated in formal experimentation and innovation.

The growth of consumption in the eighteenth century helped produce new cultural practices associated with the Enlightenment. Books were a special sort of consumer good. Their proliferation and variety encouraged multiple modes of reading that changed the relationship not only between reader and text but between self and society. While novels invited “intensive reading” and encouraged the belief in an inner emotional world, books, newspapers, and ephemeral literature stimulated “extensive reading” and the formation of a vibrant public sphere. Although the public sphere was not as bourgeois, rational, and oppositional as Jürgen Habermas claimed, the circulation of print did broaden and intensify public discussion of reformist projects. Consumption also shaped Enlightenment sociability. The material environments of Enlightenment sites of sociability facilitated socio-intellectual interaction. Men and women ate meals at salons, sipped coffee at cafés, and sported new fashions in public gardens, giving rise to robust conversational publics. Such polite sociability softened social hierarchies insofar as it created a broad cultural elite among the nobility and certain professional groups, but it also created new forms of exclusion on the basis of wealth and property. Although plebeian sociability sometimes intersected with that of elites, it often unfolded in the separate arenas of the tavern, street, and marketplace. Gender, too, remained a vector of exclusion, though wealthier women devised ways to participate in salons and attend public gatherings.