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.

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.

This chapter explores the ways in which British imperial reforms were part of broader imperial rivalries and interconnections; the racial, gender, and political limits of Enlightenment reforms; the perceptions and bargaining that shaped reforms; and the relationship between reform and Revolution. It questions teleological approaches that cast British imperial reforms in the 1760s and 1770s as having led to Revolution in the thirteen colonies. In a global and Enlightenment context, British reformers did not pursue particularly radical reforms until the Intolerable Acts of 1774. These Acts were reactionary punishments intended to reform colonial thinking and behavior. They foreclosed the previously vital bargaining process between the imperial government and the colonists, and the colonists saw dire parallels with the monopolistic and tyrannical East India Company. The government’s attempt to use non-negotiable punishment to reform colonial thinking and behavior, rather than reforms to imperial tax and trade policies, most directly stimulated Revolution.

Wrestling with the eternal mystery of human agency, seventeenth and eighteenth-century Euro-Americans built cultures in which the idea of self-making could begin to take hold. Along the way they developed new mindsets about self-fashioning, ambition, the value of work, materialist consumption, and whether individuals or communities were the proper beneficiaries of people’s improvement. The eighteenth-century’s prominent cultural movements—the Enlightenment’s intellectual developments and the First Great Awakening’s religious revivals—were both context for and products of the growing legitimacy of human agency. In very different ways, their participants and storytellers engaged in transitions that made it possible to imagine self-making. Cotton Mather and other religious leaders struggled with witch trials, epidemics, and spiritual challenges, including how to respond to the Great Awakening’s popular enthusiasms. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin explored science and politics, invented useful devices and civic institutions. Uncertainties about human agency continued, but there was no doubt about the responsibility for self-improvement to serve God and community.

For the last fifty years, scholars have accepted that the political philosophies associated with the Enlightenment and British country ideology played a central role in provoking the American Revolution. This chapter moves away from this approach to consider the broad spectrum of political thought in colonial America in the decades immediately before independence. The bulk of this thought was neither as secularized, nor as hostile to imperial authority, nor as egalitarian, nor as American as scholars have assumed. This broader perspective makes it evident that the Revolutionary breach did not grow in any meaningful way from the Enlightenment or British country thought. I argue instead that it was political thought normalized within the empire – indeed central to imperial authority’s proper functioning – and familiar to British Americans that served as the primary intellectual basis for resistance to the London authorities as the imperial crisis intensified. Colonists used Protestant political idioms that warned of the continuing dangers of popery and tyranny to indict the imperial ministry’s actions, formed arguments about the nature of the British constitution drawn from mainstream imperial political theory to undermine the London government’s authority, and invoked episodes from Britain’s tortured seventeenth-century history to legitimate their acts of resistance. This appropriation ultimately destroyed the logic of empire in British America. argue in stead that it was the colonists’ understanding of the British constitution, their use of mainstream imperial Protestant political idioms that denounced popery and Catholicism to indict the imperial

With this contract, Nicholas Mathew opens the final chapter of his recent book The Haydn Economy, which is simply entitled: ‘Work’. ‘For most of his life’, Mathew writes, ‘Haydn was constantly busy’. In the chapter, Mathew deftly traces the common origins of the musical work concept and the economic concept of work. As Mathew builds his argument, he delves into Haydn’s varying forms of labour and work, and Haydn’s reflections on them. Mathew places special emphasis on Haydn’s career after the death of Prince Nikolaus in 1790: Haydn’s new-found ‘freedom’ brought yet more labour as he entered the London marketplace.

The fifth and final chapter analyses how people of African (and indigenous) descent practiced Catholicism in the 1770s to 1790s. It puts villages in the interior Caribbean and haciendas in Antioquia in conversation with the mines of the Pacific, revealing both how there were longstanding rural autonomies and possibilities and how they could be swiftly destroyed by the arrival of conquering missionaries or visiting judges. The chapter illustrates how Catholicism was at once a mode of colonial governance and transcultural, local, and interstitial. The first section examines the reducciones of arrochelados by the conquering friar Joseph Palacios de La Vega and is followed by a discussion of trials for illicit relations in Antioquia as part of a violent Enlightenment drive to reorder colonial (and especially black) life. It concludes with an analysis of baptismal and confirmation records from the mines of Nóvita, which reveal the extent to which people of African descent and the worlds of the mines of the Pacific transformed Catholicism.

This chapter asks: how did the Enlightenment bring together and interweave the various germinating strands of individual equality, and how did enlightened writers translate the notion into political ideas and institutional schemes?

In the Feyerabend lectures on Natural Law, Kant addresses the topic of freedom of religion and thought in his commentary on the title "The Right Regarding Religion and the Church” of Achenwall’s Natural Law. Kant goes beyond the discussion proposed by the jurist and introduces two central ideas to his conception of Enlightenment, which will be developed in “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”: the idea of self-legislation of the people and the distinction between private and public uses of reason. In this paper, I will first compare Kant’s and Achenwall’s views on freedom of religion and conscience and then show how the idea of self-legislation leads Kant to establish clear limits to the sovereign regarding matters of religion. Then, I will argue that the development of Kant’s idea of public use of reason results from the historical debate about the meaning of the concept of Enlightenment that took place between 1783 and 1784, especially regarding Ernst Klein’s assertions on freedom of opinion and freedom of the press.

Popular minimalist and moderate liberal interpreters suggest that, both in the 1780s and in the more fully developed political works of the 1790s, Kant adopts a narrow and skeptical approach to state-sponsored efforts addressing social welfare. Interpreted with due attention to context, however, relevant passages from Kant’s 1784 lectures in political philosophy—the Naturrecht Feyerabend—suggest no necessarily narrow commitments in the realm of social supports. Read in conjunction with his Feyerabend discussion of innate right, meanwhile, the contemporaneous essay on enlightenment provides us reasons (including an active conception of civic agency and a positive understanding of the state’s role) to conclude that the account of justice that Kant’s early works advance indeed could support a rich menu of such programs. Publications from the 1790s might, of course, take a contrary stance. It falls to those who favor a more conservative reading, however, to prove that Kant altered an earlier, agency-oriented position friendly to state-sponsored supports.