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.

This chapter assess the philosophical foundation for Cicero’s views on human social relationships and community in the Roman Republic. Starting from De officiis 1.153, I argue that such a foundation is provided by the specifically Stoic notion of the community of gods and human beings, and of human beings as sharing rationality. The De officiis is then assessed on the basis of Cicero’s emphasis on the social aspect of virtue. The remainder of the chapter traces this same theme throughout Cicero’s theoretical writings (including his works on rhetoric), first in the earlier De inventione, De legibus, and De republica, and second in the De finibus and the Tusculanae Disputationes. Hence the commitment to this Stoic foundation for sociability is a constant in Cicero’s oeuvre.

This chapter investigates Grotius’s broader intellectual involvement with the doctrine of predestination. Grotius deliberately renounced the religious importance of predestination as he called for religious concord in a time of fierce inter-confessional strife in the United Provinces - an endeavour that almost cost him his life. Considering his abhorrence for religious dogmas about divine predestination and human free will, two of his writings, Meletius and Ordinum pietas, display a remarkable restraint on Grotius’s part on the matter. Social and political order was not to be found in unrelenting dogmatic questions of certainty about what Grotius’s viewed as theologically non-essential religious principles. Rather it required a commitment to religious toleration. This chapter argues that Grotius’s involvement in the Dutch predestination debates reveals important philosophical connections between his religious and political ideas and allows for further explication of two central aspects of Grotius’s political theory: natural sociability and the impious hypothesis. From a careful contextualisation of predestination in Grotius’s religious oeuvre, emerges an account of socialisation independent of the predestination question, and establishes the infamous ‘etiamsi daremus’ statement as an obligation device that served his pursuit for religious and political accord.

Grotius drew mainly upon the Catholic moral theologians, but his theory of contract law is set in the different perspective of his ‘secular’ natural law system.

Connecting sociability with arguments about self-interest and natural law, Grotius adopted an account of moral knowledge and motivation for justice that he found in Cicero. For Grotius, sociability serves as a counter to Epicurean views of moral motivation, but it does not by itself provide the grounds of validity of natural law, nor does it alone ground the obligatory force of natural law. Rather, sociability represents an appeal to a basis in human nature for cooperation in the state of nature. Human beings according to Grotius can be motivated to cooperate and adhere to the rules of natural law, but they are not necessarily so motivated. Importantly, Grotius appreciates that sociability creates its own problems, which Grotius believes can be solved by reason alone. For Grotius, the basis of sociability in human nature is not merely instinctual, but also rational; sociability is ultimately based on a respect for the rights to ‘first things’ such as private property, a respect which itself is motivated by right reason. The notion of sociability was to have an important future in the works of later thinkers such as Hobbes, Pufendorf, Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Hutcheson, Hume, Smith and Kant.