Enlightenment thought contributed to developing and reinforcing white supremacy in the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. While often celebrated as promoting universal liberty, Enlightenment scholarship was deeply intertwined with colonization and slavery, with many prominent thinkers either benefiting from or actively justifying human trafficking and racial hierarchies. Figures like Hans Sloane and John Locke developed new systems of human classification that departed from earlier Greek environmental theories, instead positing fixed racial categories with Europeans at the top. This early scientific racism provided justification for colonial exploitation while being funded by slavery-derived wealth. Additionally, emerging concepts of liberty and rights were explicitly limited to white men, with writers contrasting “freeborn” Englishmen to supposedly inferior races. These ideas culminated in new forms of race-based or “nation” states, exemplified by the USA, which formally enshrined white supremacy in law. While some contemporary voices criticized these developments, the profitable alliance between Enlightenment thought, colonialism, and slavery proved difficult to stop.

Abraham Lincoln's political writings were the works of a practical politician, not a political philosopher. Yet, his understanding of American politics was deeply informed by wide and penetrating reading in 19th century liberal political economy. This reading convinced him to be a determined opponent of slavery, and a vigorous promoter of henry clay's 'American system.' both of these programs retained their hold on Lincoln, and when, after his election to the presidency of the United States in 1860, the republic was plunged into civil war over slavery, Lincoln guided the nation toward the erasure of legalized slavery and to an economy favourable to commerce and manufacturing. His victory in the civil war, cut short by his assassination in 1865, nevertheless changed the political culture of the nation for the next sixty years, and set the country on the slow but inexorable path of civil equality for the freed slaves.

This Introduction offers a brief review of the central arguments and issues that arise in Hume’s Dialogues. It considers why Hume used the dialogue format to present his views and it also considers how the content of the Dialogues relates to Hume’s other philosophical works and his historical context. It concludes with a brief summary of the various contributions and an account of the way that the collection is structured and organized.

Many early Enlightenment thinkers, such as Voltaire, were educated in Jesuit schools and served absolutist monarchs pursuing political centralization in the early eighteenth century. They embraced the Jesuits’ idealized image of China and Confucianism, viewing China as a model of rational Deism and enlightened despotism for Europeans to emulate. The Physiocrats drew inspiration from China’s vast internal market, perceived as free from bureaucratic interference, to shape their ideas on laissez-faire economics. Some linguists even promoted Chinese as a universal language, claiming it was the language of God, while Leibniz suggested that ancient Chinese texts held keys to important mathematical principles. These early Enlightenment thinkers had not yet discarded their reverence for antiquity, believing that older ideas were inherently superior, and thus hailed China as the world’s oldest and hence greatest civilization.

Idealized views of China were challenged by other Enlightenment thinkers, such as Montesquieu, who represented the aristocratic opposition to absolutism and saw China as an example of extreme despotism. These contrasting views on China in the early eighteenth century reflected conflicts between absolutist monarchs and the aristocracy. The idealized portrayal of China as a model for Europe, championed in Voltaire’s writings, gained ground with the rise of absolutist states. The debate about China and the dominance of the idealizing view among early Enlightenment thinkers eventually gave way to widespread disdain for China in the late Enlightenment, seen in the works of Diderot, Kant, Hegel, and others. This late eighteenth-century contempt for China was linked to Europe’s growing confidence stemming from renewed economic and geopolitical expansion, as well as the rise of the bourgeoisie as the new patrons of intellectual pursuits. Under the idea of Europe as a progressive continent, all ancient civilizations – including China and Christianity – were attacked as stagnant, superstitious, and obstacles to human reason and progress.

This chapter is, for the most part, devoted to an appraisal of Greek art as a school of humanity. Herder applies the model of nature’s force to the work of art. The force that produces the human form in the work of art also conditions the possibilities for viewing and understanding art. Art grounds visible categories of humankind and it renders visible the ideas that make these categories intelligible. Greek statuary is seen as a formalization of timeless categories of human life, but these categories are subject to the contingencies of interpretation. He discusses the Greek idealization of childhood, heroism, the gods, fauns, satyrs, and centaurs. He then concludes that there is no such thing as formless goodness and truth. This is followed by an appraisal of allegory. A text by Johann Christoph Berens is cited as an example of practical moral enlightenment. In this connection, the question of public morals is raised with respect to Homer and Montesquieu. Kant’s pursuit of truth is praised. The chapter closes with thoughts on freedom of thought and the state.

Today, the Treatise is Hume’s most well-known work. But that was not so in the eighteenth century. Hume could even famously claim that his Treatise “fell dead-born from the press.” Still, modern scholarship has shown that the Treatise had a more significant early reception than Hume’s comment suggests. This chapter sheds new light on the reception of Hume’s Treatise in eighteenth-century Britian. It surveys the existing historiography and considers Hume’s relevant surviving correspondence. But it also explores overlooked dimensions of the Treatise’s early reception, partly by employing data mining in electronic databases, particularly Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). Analyzing that data in various ways, we illuminate new dimensions of this topic. They include unpacking close engagements by familiar figures, like Lord Kames; casting light on the many who invoked, critiqued, anthologized, or otherwise absorbed and broadcast the Treatise; and identifying the larger trends of eighteenth-century reuse to which all of those individual stories contributed.

The chapter provides a summary history of the Jews in Berlin following their readmittance in 1670 through to the period of the births of Fanny and Felix. It notes the relationship of Moses Mendelssohn with figures of the Berlin Enlightenment and the consequent parallel development of the Haskalah movement with the growing interest by prominent Jewish families in Gentile culture and Bildung, exemplified by the Berlin Jewish salons. The decision – or rather attempt – of Abraham Mendelssohn to dissociate from Judaism on the part of himself and his family is placed in the context of the development of German nationalism and the beginning of the Jewish reform movement.

The Mendelssohns were active at a time of contestation and change within music aesthetics and broader aesthetic theory. As well as outlining how they positioned themselves in relation to some of the key issues and debates of their time, the chapter examines their continuing investment in Enlightenment and classical aesthetic ideals and how this interacted with their engagement with Romanticism. It also explores the extent to which moral and aesthetic criteria are entwined in their judgements of contemporary music, fuelling their hostility towards French grand opera, the programmatic orchestral works of Berlioz, and French virtuoso pianism. Their own compositions frequently function as music-aesthetic interventions, aiming to counterbalance trends in musical life that they viewed negatively. Crucial is a discussion of the conceptions of truth and emotion at the heart of Felix’s aesthetics, explored through a comparison of his views with those of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher.

This chapter describes and analyzes the role that medicine has historically played in relation to broader cultural attachments to the idea of progress. It offers a historical overview of how the interest – or disinterest – in progress is entangled with contemporary understandings of what it means to be healthy or ill and the medical priorities of the time. Improved medical care had very different meanings depending on the respective value ascribed to individual and societal well-being, attitudes toward death, and the role of physicians. While contemporary ideas about medical progress rest on very different understandings of the human from other cultural and historical contexts, their emergence from a combination of scientific knowledge and ethical preoccupations recurs throughout history. Even as the capacity and desire to intervene in the human body with technological means has increased, both utopian and modest visions of progress in medicine have historical antecedents. The historical overview that follows is crucial for understanding how answers to the question “What is progress in medicine?” have always been contested and historically contingent.

This chapter focuses on the figures of Antonio Genovesi, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith. It begins by exploring the similarities and differences in their biographies and historical-intellectual contexts. Next, it examines the influence of Genovesi’s and Smith’s philosophies on Kant. Lastly, it provides a critical and selective review of the secondary literature regarding these authors’ perspectives on the morality of commercial life.

Prior to the Enlightenment, citizens viewed themselves as subjects of their governments, obligated to obey the mandates of the ruling class. Enlightenment thinkers argued that governments should serve their citizens, rather than citizens being servants of their governments. This had a constraining effect on the abuse of authority, but also led to a romantic notion of democratic governments being accountable to their citizens and acting in their interests, legitimizing the exercise of authority by the ruling class. This chapter discusses the historical evolution of democratic institutions to show how they emerged as a result of negotiations in a political marketplace. One advantage of democratic institutions is that the exercise of authority tends to rest with the positions people hold rather than with those people themselves. This mechanism for peacefully replacing those in authority constrains their ability to abuse their power.

Using the library of eighteenth-century attorney and legal historian Frances Hargrave as a starting point, this chapter considers the place of law, property, and state formation in the causes and results of the American Revolution. Focusing on three related themes to the place of laws in independence – the influence and break from English legal culture, the pluralism of legal practice within North America, and the place of legal institutions in either maintaining or changing the status quo – this chapter considers how both different forms of property and the different individuals and communities involved with it played a central role in the creation of an independent United States. The governments that emerged from the Revolution each relied heavily on these varied legal threads.