Seminar Questions

• What was the Enlightenment?
• What was the purpose of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie?
• How do Voltaire and Rousseau imagine society and what impact do they attribute to the arts and sciences?

Core Reading

• Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation (excerpt)
  
• Diderot, the entry 'Encyclopedia' in the Encyclopédie (excerpt)
• JJ Rousseau, 'First Discourse on the Arts and Sciences' [electronic resource]
• R. Darnton, 'The Great Divide: Rousseau on the Route to Vincennes' in George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 107-118.
• For background, Popkin, History of Modern France, ch 4.

Further Reading

Classic and General works

• Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1954 [orig. 1856])
• T. Munck, ‘Enlightenment’ in W. Doyle (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Ancien Regime [e-book, library, under subheading 'Solvents?']
• E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1951 [orig. 1932])
• C. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-century Philosophers (1932)
• R. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: enlightenment and the pathogenesis of modern society (1988 [orig. 1954])
• P. Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (1966, 1969); Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (1959)
• N. Hampson, The Enlightenment (1968)
• J. Israel, A Revolution of the Mind (2011)
• D. Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (2010)

Politics, Religion and Enlightenment

• K. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (1990)
• D. Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670-1789 (1994)
• D. Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1996)
• H. Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva. From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749-1762 (2007)
• D. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (2001)
• M. Linton, The Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment France (2001)
• K. Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably (1997)
• M. Vovelle, The Revolution against the Church: from Reason to the Supreme Being (1991)
• D. Sorkin, Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (2011)
• M. Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-century French Trades (1988); Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (2007); Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-century Emblem in the French Revolution (2008)
• L. Brockliss, Calvet's Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France (2002)
• A. C. Kors, Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, 4 vos. (2003)
• L. Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1995)
• R. Kreiser, Miracles, convulsions, and ecclesiastical politics in early eighteenth-century Paris (1978)
• J. Merrick, The Desacralization of the French Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century (1990)
• D. Brewer, The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing (1993)
• N. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (1980)
• M. Cranston, Philosophers and Pamphleteers: Political Theorists of the Enlightenment (1986)
• A. Lilti, The World of the Salons: Sociability and Worldliness in Eighteenth-century Paris (2015)

Print and Public Opinion

• J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989 [orig. 1962])
• R. Darnton, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Prerevolutionary France (1996); The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1981); The Devil in the Holy Water, or The Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon (2010)
• R. Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (1987)
• T. Rigogne, Between State and Market: Printing and Bookselling in Eighteenth-century France (2007)
• L. Rosenband, Papermaking in Eighteenth-Century France: Management, Labor, and Revolution at the Montgolfier Mill, 1761-1805 (2000)
• J. McLeod, Licensing loyalty: printers, patrons, and the state in early modern France (2011)
• R. Birn, The Royal Censorship of Books in Eighteenth-century France (2012); Forging Rousseau: Print, Commerce and Cultural Manipulation in the Late Enlightenment (2001)
• G. Turnovsky, The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime (2010)
• C. Walton (ed.), Into Print: Limits and Legacies of the Enlightenment (2011)
• R. Darnton and D. Roche, A Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775-1800 (1989)
• M. Root-Bernstein, Boulevard Theater and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1984)
• J. Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791 (1999)
• A. Farge, Subversive Words: Public Opinion in the 18th Century (1994)
• L. J. Graham, If the King Only Knew: Seditious Speech in the Reign of Louis XV (2000)
• J. Censer, The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment (1994)
• S. E. Melzer and K. Norberg (eds.), From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France (1998)
• Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (2003)
• S. Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-century France (2001)
• S. Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The causes célèbres of pre-Revolutionary France (1993)