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The article examines the thought of French nobleman, politician, philosopher, and writer Marquis de Sade, with particular focus given to the theme of happiness and the conflict between motion and rest. The concepts of antiphysism, isolism, and intensivism are discussed. The influence of Epicureanism and Sade's theory of emotion are also mentioned.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, after years of denouncing the French Revolution and the influence of French politics and philosophy on American culture, Federalist writers began to invoke Old Regime France as a symbol of the traditional values that they perceived to be under threat in Jeffersonian America. This essay explores the dialectical relationship between the ancien re'gime and "the modern French school" in Federalist periodical writing and argues that the concept of the ancien re'gime emerged in reaction to the embrace of an increasingly democratic, egalitarian political discourse by Jefferson's supporters. Writers for the Philadelphia Gazette of the United States and Joseph Dennie's Port Folio invoked an idealized image of France's Old Regime to legitimize their own political and aesthetic values against the supposed democratization, or "leveling," of American culture; to argue for the need for a "natural aristocracy" to govern the U.S. republic; and to establish proper taste in literature as one of the standards through which this elite class would distinguish itself. Tracing these uses of the ancien re'gime in Federalist periodical writing, this essay argues that the emergence of American conservatism as a self-conscious political and aesthetic project owes as much to engagements with French as with British conservatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the exclusion of Sophie de Grouchy, the wife of the French philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet, in the publication of his notes on the history of the progress of human nature called "Prospectus." It offers a look at the writing and editing of "Prospectus" following the death of Condorcet. It also discusses sexual equality and the progress of human nature as mentioned in the manuscript.

This article traces the concept of reciprocity from its emergence in French philosophy during the Enlightenment to its recent growth in the humanities and social sciences. After charting the term’s accelerated use in French and English in the modern period, the article shows how its meaning has continually wavered between exchange equivalence (barter) and generosity and obligation (the gift, the Golden Rule). During the Enlightenment, these meanings converged in efforts to naturalize commerce and justify liberal economic reforms. A free-market society, it was argued, would be fair and bountiful. Upon the failure of such reforms in the early French Revolution, reciprocity and its new synonym “fraternity” became detached from economic liberalism. As capitalism became increasingly associated with wealth inequality in the nineteenth century, reciprocity became the watchword of capitalism’s critics, who tried to conceptualize social bonds in terms other than those offered by Homo economicus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study attempts to show in which cases the barbarism discussed and sometimes openly advocated by the French philosophers of the 18th century (Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau) relates back to some pagan habits and realities for mystically-romantic and for nostalgically-instinctual reasons and in which cases it has to do with rudimentary and bloodthirsty uses of reason. As these thinkers ignited the first precious and powerful sparks in the direction of a historical recuperation of the phenomenological and aesthetic roots of man, our material represents an attempt to explain the political and historical phenomenon which brought back to the table the discussion concerning the cultural origins of Europe and which resurrected the pagan fascinations and fears within the cultural imaginary of the coming epochs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades, scholars have reassessed the role of amour-propre in Rousseau’s thought. While it was once believed that he had an entirely negative valuation of the emotion, it is now widely held that he finds it useful and employs it to strengthen moral attachments, conjugal love, civic virtue and moral heroism. At the same time, scholars are divided as to whether this positive amour-propre is an antidote to the negative or dangerous form. Some scholars are confident that ‘inflamed’ amour-propre can be overcome while others adopt a more fatalistic view. While mindful of Rousseau’s pessimism in his most famous works, this essay seeks to identify a middle position. By contending Rousseau’s discussion of amour-propre is largely concerned with the problems surrounding identity construction in commercial, urban societies, it will be argued that amour-propre can be lessened to manageable levels in more rural societies, that is, agrarian provincial life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The essay provides an overview of works of scholarship about eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, including biographies, critical editions of his work, and critical studies of his writings. Books discussed include "Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754" by Maurice Cranston, "Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius" by Leo Damrosch, and "Œuvres complètes" 5 volumes, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond.

Rousseau's account of the legislator of “superior intelligence” in Book II of On the Social Contract is often viewed as one of the most inegalitarian and undemocratic features of his entire political theory. I argue that, on the contrary, his treatment of the legislator is a central element of Rousseau's effort to construct a viable theory of popular sovereignty in modernity. I focus on two main aspects of Rousseau's legislator account. First, I demonstrate how Rousseau attempted to establish a popular normative foundation for his legislator to, in effect, democratize the more traditional notion of political founding and statesmanship associated with his predecessor Montesquieu. Second, I argue that Rousseau presents the legislator as an agent for future change in the relation of politics and religion, especially for the establishment of civil religions that promote tolerance and social peace. Rousseau's legislator thus embodies democratic principles of legitimacy for a modern republican founding narrative designed for post-feudal, secular Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Though it has rarely been the subject of academic criticism, there is a philosophy of truth that animates Jean-Jacques Rousseau's broader philosophical system. This philosophy of truth was unique for its time—in the same way as the whole of Rousseau's thought—in its emphasis on feeling over reason, the heart over the mind, the simple over the sophisticated, the useful over the demonstrable, the personal over the systematic. Rousseau's philosophy of truth might be more accurately called a ‘philosophy of truthseeking’ or an ‘ethics of truthseeking’, because its focus is on the pursuit and acquisition of truth rather than on the nature of truth itself. What was needed, Rousseau believed, was a guide back to the simple truths of human happiness—truths that were immediately apparent to us in our natural state but have become opaque in society. This article describes Rousseau's normative philosophy of truthseeking, of what human beings must do if they hope to (re)discover the truths of human happiness. This philosophy can be summarised as utility, autonomy, immediacy and simplicity in pursuit of what Rousseau called the ‘truths that pertain to the happiness of mankind’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the complex and contested geo-politics associated with the concept of a universal human society during the era of the French Revolution. It focuses on the figure of Constantin-François Volney (1757–1820), a neglected philosopher who played a significant role in the history of both French anti-imperialist thought and French imperial practice in North Africa and the Levant. It uses that focus to explore the relationship between visions of human emancipation and the exercise of global power during the 1790s and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, focusing particularly on the interrelationship between the citizen and the solitary, sometimes referred to as the natural man. It explores how Rousseau united such dual notions and his ideas for a communion of two oppositional models of behavior. Topics include the state of nature, man's role in society, and the theories of education forwarded in the book "Emile."

The career of Jacques-Pierre Brissot (1754–1793) featured two phases, separated dramatically by the Revolution of 1789. Before the revolutionary crisis and the subsequent political struggle that was to cost him his life, Brissot was an avocet who never practised but sought instead a career as a writer—and indeed as a philosophe, seeing himself as an ally of Diderot. The improbability of such an alliance was not lessened by his early and continuing alliance with Linguet. Before embarking in1778 on what would be a prolific career as a published author, Brissot had written the manuscript on which attention is focused here. This is an uncompleted ‘Plan Raisoné’ for a comprehensive sceptical critique of all systematic claims to certainty in knowledge. There is an evident though problematic relationship here with Brissot's 1782 De la vérité, but it is also clear that the influence of Rousseau and Brissot's increasingly radical political outlook must have entailed a widening divergence from the scepticism he had previously extolled—the ‘Pyrrhonism’ that would protect sensible readers against dogmatic absurdity. Death on the scaffold proclaimed certainty, not doubt. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the work of 18th century French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie and 18th century Netherlands born English philosopher, political economist, and satirist, Bernard de Mandeville, with a focus on the connection between morality and politics, and the role of virtue. Topics discussed include concepts of political philosophy and relativity in ethics, the work "Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue," by Mandeville, and the concepts of epicureanism and the connection between virtue and happiness.

In about 1735, Emilie Du Châtelet began to translate Mandeville's Fable of the Bees. Her work, which is largely ignored by scholars, did, as this article demonstrates, turn out to be one of transformation rather than of translation and came at a crucial moment in the emerging French luxury debate. So far commercial society and luxury had been defended in purely economic terms, for instance in Melon's Essai politique, or as an aspect of divine providence for fallen man, by Pierre Nicole amongst others. There was as yet no coherent defence on the level of secular ethics. As this article shows, Du Châtelet set out to remedy this. In co-operation with Voltaire, with whose recent praise of English society in the Lettres philosophiques she strongly identified, she rewrote the Fable to offer a defence of modern commercial society as both natural and moral. The article argues that she was able to do so by taking recourse to classic Epicureanism in the guise of Lucretius' De rerum natura, as an alternative to the Neo-Epicureanism, with its Augustinian overtones, as espoused by Mandeville. Voltaire in turn used her translation to lay the foundations for his defence of commercial society and progress in his Traité de métaphysique in which he uses the precise passages she had inserted into Mandeville's original. This article analyses the further aspects Voltaire adds to her arguments. Taken together, Du Châtelet's ‘translation’ and Voltaire's Traité offer a coherent defence of bourgeois society that would underlie Voltaire's later historiographical and philosophical works and which were crucial to his concept of ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘progress’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the 17th and 18th century development of musical thought and genres such as the melodrama, with reference to elements of musical language and the relationship between music, lyrics, and poetics, as well as in connection with the literary genre of romanticism. Topics discussed include the context of 17th century French musical philosophy, within the aesthetic thought of this period; the musical philosophy of 18th century French abbot Jean Baptiste Dubos, and the work of 18th century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The article discusses the influence of 18th century French Enlightenment philosophy on Chinese intellectual life under the China's late Qing Dynasty from the late 19th century through the early 20th century, including in regard to the influence of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. An overview of the influence of Western civilization on China, including on Chinese political reforms, is provided.

Cultural history's recent treatments of Sieyès' political theory have understood his political writings in their convergences with and divergences from Rousseau's political theory. By sketching a thoroughgoing analogy between the ecclesiological arguments in Malebranche's Entretiens sur la Métaphysique et sur la Religion (1688) and the arguments that Sieyès offers on the floor of the National Assembly concerning the nature of representation, I suggest that we should recontextualize Sieyès' speeches vis-à-vis the broader discourse of the 'general will,' which was theological at its root. That is, the arguments Sieyès offers for the sovereignty of the National Assembly, separately and in combination, appear to have been shaped by a malebranchiste ecclesiology that grew out of the particular context of the Jansenist challenge to the Church. This argument has ramifications not just for our understanding of Sieyès and revolutionary political theory but also for what have been called the "religious origins of the French Revolution." ☆ I am grateful to Bill Sewell, Dale Van Kley, Michael Sonenscher, Chris Brooke, and Sam James, for their careful readings and insightful comments at various stages of this project. More generally, I am thankful for the thoughts of the participants of the Cambridge conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History (March 2010). Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewers of History of European Ideas for their comments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his Dissertation sur la liberte (1754b), Condillac propounds a theory of choice that is intrinsically probabilistic. Reflecting on the cases which we would qualify as 'paradoxes in expected utility' he puts these down to common faults, explicable by 'delusions' and 'dominant desires'. This article concerns the revelation of this original procedure of a philosopher who had little interest in mathematics who constructed a clearly probabilistic procedure of choice. By a Bayesian revision of our probabilistic belief and our 'delusions', we sometimes 'prefer that which we desire less' and this way of thinking explain our endogenous changes of preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, mentions Niccolò Machiavelli by name in his extant works just a handful of times. That, however, he read him carefully and thoroughly time and again there can be no doubt, and it is also clear that he couches his argument both in his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline and in his Spirit of Laws as an appropriation and critique of the work of the predecessor whom he termed 'this great man'. In this paper I explore the manner in which the Frenchman redeployed the arguments advanced by the Florentine for the purpose of refuting the latter's conclusions. ☆ In citing Machiavelli, I employ N. Machiavelli, Tutte le opere, ed. M. Martelli (Florence, 1971), and I refer to the divisions within each work provided by the author. To make my references to Machiavelli's Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio more precise, I sometimes also employ the paragraph enumeration added by the editors of N. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, tr. H. C. Mansfield and N. Tarcov (Chicago, 1996). In citing Montesquieu, wherever possible, I have employed the splendid new critical edition being produced by the Société Montesquieu: Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, Œuvres complètes de Montesquieu, ed. J. Ehrard, C. Volpilhac-Auger, et al., 22 vols. (Oxford, 1998-), which I cite as VF. I cite Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1734), ed. F. Weil and C. Courtney, as CR by chapter and, where appropriate, line from VF, ii, 89–285. I cite Montesquieu, De l'Esprit des lois (1757), as EL by part, book, chapter, and, where appropriate, page from Montesquieu, Œuvres complètes de Montesquieu, ed. R. Caillois, 2 vols. (Paris, 1949–51), ii, 225–995, and Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, Mes pensées as MP by number from Montesquieu, Œuvres complètes de Montesquieu, ed. A. Masson, 3 vols. (Paris, 1950–5), ii, 1–677. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay discusses the history of early modern French economist François Quesnay and his followers known as the physiocrats. It explores the nature of the relationships between the 18th century scientists and scholars as a classical school of economics. It also considers the social and cultural contexts of the Republic of Letters and the Enlightenment during the reign of French King Louis XV and his court at the palace of Versailles. An overview of economic historiography regarding the physiocrats is presented.

One of the most important debates in the field of eighteenth-century French intellectual history concerns the ideological significance of the rise of the cult of the Great Frenchmen. Taking this debate as a frame of reference, the paper attempts a close reading of Robespierre's Eloge de Gresset (written in 1784, published in 1785). Usually dismissed by Robespierre scholars, this text is, in fact, a very important document offering clues not only to Robespierre's intellectual formation, but also his appropriation of what he regarded as the official and conventional rhetoric of his age. These questions engage the larger debate regarding the origins of the French Revolution, in particular its 'cultural origins', and its intellectual origins, defined as the distillation of and interactions between competing representations of society and its relation to the public sphere. The thesis proposed is that Robespierre's eulogy of Gresset indicates that his anti-philosophical ideas came from a much broader array of sources than previously believed. Among these sources, Gresset's 1740s-1750s polemics against the philosophes pointed the way towards the type of criticism of the Enlightenment that underpinned Robespierre's cultural revolutionary politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is presented of the book "Émile, ou de l'éducation," by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and whether it is a work of philosophy that deals with education or a work of fiction that examines education from a literary perspective. Of particular interest is how the text deals with Émile's reading of the novel "Robinson Crusoe," by Daniel Defoe.

The article discusses eighteenth-century French philosopher abbé Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and his 1749 work "Traité des systêmes (Treatise on Systems)." It considers the use and meaning of the French word "système" in the early eighteenth century, especially in science and natural philosophy, the literary debate over the word's meaning in the later half of the eighteenth century, and how such debates were informative about the Enlightenment in France. Other subjects include rationalism, empiricism, and the Republic of Letters.

Rousseau refers to the Jews in major and minor works, setting them alongside the Greeks and Romans as models for republican politics. Yet Rousseau's use of the Jewish example has been almost entirely neglected. I argue that this example, which for Rousseau stands between paganism and Christianity, plays a unique role in Rousseau's political thought. In particular, Judaism, as Rousseau presents it, surpasses Christianity in its this-worldly emphasis on compassion and justice, an emphasis that even the classical republics that are Rousseau's usual models for social and political well-being cannot match. It does so, moreover, without fostering the dogmatism that, along with Christian otherworldiness, has, in Rousseau's estimation, helped to spoil European politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upon close examination of Rousseau's accounts of human development, we find that Rousseau presents us with paradoxical chronologies in which the experience of supposed immediacy from which humans are said to originate always seems to be informed by, and even require, previous mediation. More specifically, reflection, comparison, and imagination are thought to exist only after the onset of perfectibility, but these mediating capacities are always already present in pity and self-love, as well as for the "independent" savage, calling into question the possibility that any human sentiment or condition could be immediately accessible and fundamentally imbuing human life with ambiguity, fluidity, and disorder. Consequently, morality and freedom for Rousseau require the negotiation, stabilization, or management of the unstable "things between" human beings and their experiences, the object world, and others, even as such management is best hidden from view and experienced as given and true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As they debated the pros and cons of grafting, eighteenth-century French agronomists, philosophers, novelists, and poets negotiated the tensions and contradictions that surfaced between their nostalgia for a "natural" society, and their dreams of perpetual innovation, culture, and progress. The discourse on grafting helped authors articulate their understandings of the merits or faults of civilization, just as it also allowed them to define good civic participation and ideal forms of stewardship of the land. Furthermore, insofar as grafts could be read as figures of the transplantation and integration of foreign culture(s), they could be used metaphorically to allude to current political events and problems. As a result, the discourse on grafting intersected with, and engaged, some of the key issues of the French Enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses eighteenth century French aesthetics, focusing particularly on descriptions of dramatic tableau as described by French intellectual Denis Diderot in his books "Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel (1757)" and "Discours de la poésie dramatique (1758)." Some of the subjects considered include poetics, rhetoric, hypotyposis, signs and symbolism in art, literature, and poetry, and the use of visualization in writing and drama. The author also considers how the book "Dialogues sur l'éloquence en général, et sur celle de la chaire en particulier (1718)" and the novel "Les Aventures de Télémaque (1717)," both by François Fénelon, influenced Diderot.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau's attack on the natural jurisprudence of Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf is well known. But what happened to modern natural jurisprudence after Rousseau not very well known. The aim of this article is to try to show how and why it turned into what Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès called “social science” and the bearing that this Rousseau-inspired transformation has on making sense of ideology, or the moral and political thought of the late eighteenth-century French ideologues. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In the early 1760s, the entry dedicated to the term “social” in Diderot's Encyclopédie claimed that it was “un mot nouvellement introduit dans la langue.” Strictly speaking, this description was inaccurate: “social” had already appeared (though very sporadically) in seventeenth-century French texts. But the essence of the Encyclopédie's argument was correct: “social” had been so marginal in French up until the mid-eighteenth century that its wide deployment in enlightened discourse from the 1740s onward could be treated as a new appearance. The article main argument is that “social's” new appearance in the mid-1740s was of considerable intellectual importance. To support this argument, the article is divided into three parts. The first outlines the general premises of the research into the word “social” and its significance. By placing this research within the ongoing investigation of the semantic field around “société” in enlightened philosophy, the article claims that such an investigation is much more than an etymological exercise. The special epistemological status of “social” in enlightened philosophy makes an understanding of the reasons for its rapid domination of French philosophical discourse a most rewarding project from the perspective of intellectual history. The second part of the article provides empirical evidence for the argument that “social” had been all but completely absent from French intellectual discourse before the mid-eighteenth century. It is of course harder to ascertain the absence of a word before a given point in time than to confirm its presence, but many different indications substantiate the essence of the Encyclopédie's claim. These indications also allow one to follow “social's” discursive rise after about 1745 and to speculate about the identity of the author(s) responsible for it. All evidence lead to two philosophes, the article claims: Diderot and Rousseau. Finally, the third part of the article presents an argument about the reasons for “social's” rapid naturalization in French enlightened thought and discusses what the philosophes tried so intensively to do, achieve, or express with “social.” Possible answers to this question lead to a reevaluation of mid-eighteenth century enlightened thought in general and contemporary philosophes in particular. Most importantly, such answers allow us to reflect on how we write and think about the intellectual achievements of the mid-eighteenth century, and in what way we, too, still inhabit the mental universe the philosophes helped to create. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article presents a contextualised study of French philosopher and Oratorian Nicolas Malebranche's views on women's taste and potential for creativity. The author argues that Malebranche's epistemological theories of women's physiological and psychological thought and sense processes were influenced by French philosopher René Descartes. The books "Dictionnaire philosophique," by Didier Pierre Chicaneau de Neuvillé, and "Médecine de l'esprit," by Antoine Le Camus, as well as the writings of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau are also considered.

The article examines the transition from the intellectual culture of Louis XIV at the turn of the 18th century to that of the philosophes in France. The role of natural philosophy that effected the transition is particularly cited and explored. Questions of politics, religion, literature, and tolerance are each raised and addressed in the context of the French intellectual culture, primarily from the reform of the Académie des Sciences in 1699 to the appearance of Voltaire's "Lettres philosophiques" in 1734.

The author considers how the Enlightenment in France led to the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars and discusses the historiography of the French Enlightenment. The theories of historians including J. G. A. Pocock, Jonathan Israel, and Keith Michael Baker are considered. Some of the subjects discussed include the Jansenists, the Jesuit influence on the French Catholic Church, French philosophers Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Seven Years' War, and the economic and social reform policies of French King Louis XVI.

First delivered as the Cassal Lecture at the University of London in 2004, 'Women in dialogue and solitude' explores the position of women in philosophy in France. Moving between the twentieth and seventeenth centuries, the article examines the work of two women in dialogue with male philosophers: Claire Parnet, who co-authored Dialogues (1977) with Gilles Deleuze, and Béatrice Berlowitz, who wrote Quelque part dans l'inachevé (1978) with Vladimir Jankélévitch. Their respective positions and philosophical methods are then compared with those of Gabrielle Suchon (1631-1703) who worked in solitude in the seventeenth century, publishing two important works, lie Traité de la morale et de la politique (1693) and Du célibat volontaire (1700). In illuminating the work of Suchon, and the roles played by Parnet and Berlowitz, the article also throws light on the work of their male contemporaries, Descartes, Deleuze and Jankélévitch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces a series of articles dealing with biology, medicine and biomedical discourse in 18th-century French Enlightenment.

The article examines the association of the eighteenth century concept of progress to language and communication development according to French philosophers. It notes the dominance of evolution during the Enlightenment with the implication of the idea of progress to constant change for the better or development in man's cultural achievements. The philosophers conclude that communication and language reflected civilization progress through creation, improvement, and constant change.