33. William Robertson, The Progress of Society in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 31.
34. Robertson, Progress of Society in Europe, 67.
35. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: Macmillan, 1949), XXIII:22.
36. Robertson, Progress of Society in Europe, 8.
37. Of course, both Francis Bacon and René Descartes had deprecated the intellectual achievements of the ancients, especially in the realm of science; and the French academician Charles Perrault had launched the famous battle of the “ancients” and “moderns” in 1687 when he questioned the assumption that classical culture was necessarily superior to its successors. See the classic J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (New York: Macmillan, 1932). However, it was the Enlightenment that explained why both assertions were true—that is, because of the relative backward nature of ancient society.
38. David Hume, “Of Commerce,” in Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 264.
39. Smith, Inquiry into Wealth of Nations, 208 (IV:9).
40. Ibid., 308 (V:1).
Chapter 22: Starting Over: Plato, Rousseau, and Revolution
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (Paris: Garnier, 1973), part 2, letter 14.
2. Lester Crocker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (London: Macmillan, 1968), 1:141–42.
3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), 270.
4. Rousseau, Nouvelle Héloïse, part 2, letter 17.
5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses [Discourse on Arts and Sciences], trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 6.
6. Ibid., 22, 11.
7. Ibid., 17, 19, 25.
8. Diderot quoted in Crocker, Rousseau, 1:220.
9. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, or Education, trans. Barbara Foxley (New York: Dutton, 1911), I:8.
10. According to Paul Shorey, Platonism Ancient and Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938), 86.
11. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Thomas Nugent (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 1:316 (XX:1).
12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 109.
13. Ibid., 115.
14. Ibid., 116.
15. Drawn largely from his adolescent fascination with Plutarch’s Lives, which, at least as much as Plato, shaped his picture of the ancient world and its virtues. See Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957; repr., London: Longmans, 1959), 25.
16. Plato, The Laws, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 162 (739d); 448 (942b).
17. Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 82.
18. Rousseau, Émile, I:8.
19. For instance, David Hume cites the Spartans’ “peculiar laws” as an example of how the ancient polis “was violent, and contrary to the more natural course of things.” Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 259.
20. Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy, quoted in Norman Hampson, Will and Circumstance: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the French Revolution (London: Duckworth, 1983), 33.
21. Rousseau quoted in Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 175.
22. Roger Masters, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 362.
23. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Government of Poland, trans. Willmoore Kendall (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 3. The use of mathematical formulae extends to the Social Contract as well, especially Book III; see Masters, Political Philosophy of Rousseau, 340–45.
24. Rousseau, Government of Poland, 8.
25. Ibid., 68–69.
26. Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant, Goethe: Two Essays (1945; repr., Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), 20.
27. Immanuel Kant, “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” in Kant on History, ed. L. W. Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 68.
28. See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), passim.
29. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Kant on History, 106.
30. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” ibid., 21.
31. See the letter from Baron de Grimm from 1752, quoted in Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754 (New York: Norton, 1982), 234.
32. Quoted in Crocker, Rousseau, vol. 2.
33. Hampson, Will and Circumstance, 44.
34. For the success of The Confessions, see Huntington Williams, Rousseau and Romantic Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); and Eugene Stelzig, The Romantic Subject in Autobiography: Rousseau and Goethe (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000).
35. Gita May, Madame Roland and the Age of Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 58.
36. Madame Roland quoted in ibid., 162.
37. Christopher Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The “Confessions” as Political Philosophy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 49–52.
38. Kenneth Clark, The Romantic Rebellion: Romantic Versus Classic Art (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 25.
39. Roger Barny, Rousseau dans la revolution: Le Personnage de Jean-Jacques et les debuts du culte revolutionaire (1787–1791) (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1986), 135–36.
40. Astonishingly, this “political reverie” was penned in the mid-1770s; quoted in May, Madame Roland, 72.
41. Georges Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, trans. R. R. Palmer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947), 21–22.
42. Ibid., 22.
43. Quoted in Lewis Namier, 1848: The Revolt of the Intellectuals (1944; repr., New York: Doubleday, 1964), 8.
44. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 84, 87.
45. Quoted in Hampson, Will and Circumstance, 143.
46. Quoted in ibid., 257.
47. As noted by William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
48. May, Madame Roland, 291–92.
49. Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791); see Peter Stanlis, Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1991), 175; Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 68.
Chapter 23: “Feeling Is All”: The Triumph of the Romantics
1. Edmé Champion, J.-J. Rousseau et la révolution française (Paris: A. Colin, 1909), 120.
2. This is the official count, largely accepted by scholars, in Donald Greer, The Incidence of the Terror During the French Revolution: A Statistical Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935). The full count, including unofficial roundups and executions, may be much higher.
3. The best account of Robespierre’s execution is by Irish exile Hamilton Rowan, in J. M. Thompson, English Eye-Witnesses to the French Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1938), 257–58.
4. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
5. This famous passage is from Book IX of The Prelude, lines 108–9.
6. Hölderlin quoted in Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (1919; repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 82.
7. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. R. Snell (1954; repr., New York: Ungar, 1971), 39.
8. Denis Diderot, Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (1778; Gutenberg Project, 2002).
9. William Wordsworth, “Remembrance of Collins, Composed Upon the Thames at Richmond.”
10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 362.
11. See Anand Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment: A Social History (London: Croom Helm, 1976).
12. See Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953; repr., New York: Norton, 1958), 72–73.
13. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: Abraham Mills, 1889).
14. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One, trans. Philip Wayne (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949), 43–44.
15. The best summary of the arguments is still Jacques Barzun’s Classic, Romantic, and Modern (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943).
16. Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, 10.
17. The classic work by Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953).
18. Aristotle, Poetics, in Introduction to Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library, 1967), 4 (1448b).
19. Ibid., 13 (1453–1453b).
20. R. W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1963). For the influence of Aristotle’s Poetics (via the Hellenistic critic Neoptolemus of Parium) on Horace’s Ars Poetica, see C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963); and John Boyd, The Function of Mimesis and Its Decline (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 38–39. See also Aristotle, Poetics, 25 (1460b).
21. For instance, Charles Batteux’s Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe (1747; repr., New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1988). The principle was that by selecting the best parts of nature, the artist produces a whole more perfect than nature. Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote in his Discourses on Painting that the painter forms an abstract ideal of nature “more perfect than any original.”
22. Winckelmann quoted in R. Wittkower, “Imitation, Eclecticism, and Genius,” in Earl Wasserman, ed., Aspects of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 145.
23. Percy Bysshe Shelley, letter to T. L. Peacock, 1821, quoted in Newman Ivey White, Shelley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), 2:333–34.
24. Ibid., 2:22–23. This was in 1818.
25. Ion, in Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Bollingen, 1961), 219, 220.
26. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), quoted in Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, 207.
27. See Nowell Smith, ed., Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism (1905; repr., Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1980).
28. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in David Lee Clark, ed., Shelley’s Prose (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954), 281.
29. Ibid., 282.
30. Ibid., 294.
31. Ibid., 294, 295.
32. Noted by Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, 70.
33. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education, 21, 40: and especially Letter 6.
34. Shelley, “Defence of Poetry,” 297.
35. Shelley quoted in Carl Pletsch, Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius (New York: Free Press, 1991), 5.
36. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 111.
37. Shelley, “Defence of Poetry,” 296.
38. White, Shelley, 2:377.
39. Mary Shelley, letter of April 1821, quoted in ibid., 2:282.
40. Benita Eisler, Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999); Harold Spender, Byron and Greece (London: G. Murray, 1924).
Chapter 24: Victorian Crossroads: Hegel, Marx, and Mill
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949).
2. Peter Stearns, 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe (New York: Norton, 1974), 76–77.
3. A.J.P. Taylor, Napoleon to Lenin: Historical Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 26.
4. Georges Duveau, 1848: The Making of a Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1967).
5. Tocqueville, Recollections; Karl Marx, “The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850,” in Karl Marx on Revolution, trans. and ed. Saul Padover (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 173.
6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Revolution of 1848–49: Articles from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 44–45.
7. Robert Payne, Marx (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), 67.
8. In Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 2:49.
9. In his De Orbis Planetarum of 1801, he attempted to prove by a priori deduction that there was not, and never could be, any planet or heavenly body between Mars and Jupiter. He did not know that the asteroid Ceres had been discovered just months earlier.
10. As noted by Popper, Open Society, 2:36–37.
11. Georg Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
12. For example, Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
13. Georg Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 381–83.
14. Ibid., 452.
15. See Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 164–65.
16. Georg Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. N. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 331.
17. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 40–41.
18. Quoted in Popper, Open Society, 2:75.
19. Compare Marx’s The German Ideology and Engels’s Letter to Mehring (1893). Also see Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Verso, 1991).
20. The phrases come from an early draft of The German Ideology, written before the June Days in 1844–45; see Payne, Marx, 127–28.
21. Quoted in Paul Johnson, The Intellectuals (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 71.
22. As was pointed out shortly after its publication in 1848 by the economist Bruno Hildebrand, and in more damning detail in the Henderson and Chaloner 1958 edition of Condition. Yet while the fallacious basis of Marx’s economics (for instance, his surplus or labor theory of value) has been steadily exposed, Engels’s deceptive (at times deliberately so) account of the effects of industrialization has survived as a persistent myth.
23. Payne, Marx, 356.
24. Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, in Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis Feuer (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 111.
25. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, vol. 3., quoted in Popper, Open Society, 103.
26. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (1924; repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 4–7; Michael St. John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (London: Secker & Warburg, 1954), 20–23.
27. As noted by Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 774–75.
28. Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mill: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 26–27.
29. Mill, Autobiography, 94.
30. Ibid., 103.
31. See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of Church and State (1838; repr., London: Dent, 1972).
32. Mill, Autobiography, 113–14.
33. As noted in William Thomas, Mill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 71–73.
34. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 132.
35. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1974), 297.
36. Mill, On Liberty, 72.
37. See Capaldi, Mill, 283.
38. Mill, On Liberty, 136–37.
39. Ibid., 136.
40. Here Mill relied on Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis in Democracy in America. See Alan S. Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckha
rdt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
41. Mill, On Liberty, 105.
42. Ibid., 136.
43. Ibid., 63.
44. Capaldi, Mill, 210–17.
45. Quoted in Thomas, Mill, 89–90.
46. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, quoted in Capaldi, Mill, 208.
47. Mill, On Liberty, 59.
48. See Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant, Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship: The Life and Thought of the British Idealists (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984).
Chapter 25: The Scale of Nature: Darwin, Evolution, and Aristotle’s God
1. Edward Dolan, Green Universe: The Story of Alexander von Humboldt (New York: Dodd & Mead, 1959), 62–63.
2. Humboldt quoted in Val Gendron, The Dragon Tree: A Life of Alexander von Humboldt (London: Longmans, Green, 1961), 76.
3. Dolan, Green Universe, 71.
4. Gendron, Dragon Tree, 78.
5. Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (1845; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), vol. 1, introduction.
6. Ibid.
7. Gendron, Dragon Tree, 72.
8. Charles Darwin, Autobiography of Charles Darwin (New York: H. Schuman, 1950), 33.
9. Darwin quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959).
10. Jacques Barzun, From Grandeur to Decadence (New York: Harper & Row, 2000), 501.
11. Thomas Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 113.
12. Barry Gower, Scientific Method: A Historical and Philosophical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1997), 110–11.
13. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ibid., 83.
14. Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 1, introduction.
15. Henry Kamen, Imperial Spain 1469–1714 (London: Longmans, 1983).
16. Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the Indians (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), 31.
17. Quoted in ibid., 47.
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