Enlightened Sentiments reassesses the enlightenment's liberal legacies by revisiting the wide-ranging development of eighteenth-century letters known as "sentimentalism." Nazar argues that the recent retrieval of sentimentalism as a predominantly affective culture of sensibility elides its critical motif of moral and aesthetic judgment and underrates its contributions to the key Enlightenment norm of autonomy. Drawing upon novelists from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen, and theorists of judgment from David Hume to Hannah Arendt, the author contends that sentimental judgment complicates received understandings of liberal ethics as grounded in the opposition of reason and feeling, and autonomy and sociability and, as such, implies a powerful counter-challenge to postmodernist critiques of modernity as the harbinger principally of instrumentalist reason and disciplinary power.

Introduction -- Reconstructing sentimentalism -- Sentimentalism and the discourses of freedom : the aesthetic analogy from Hume to Arendt -- Judging Clarissa's heart -- A sentimental education : Rousseau to Godwin -- Judgment, propriety, and the critique of sensibility: the "sentimental" Jane Austen.

A benchmark in the history of economics and of political ideas, Rothschild shows us the origins of laissez-faire economic thought and its relation to political conseratism in an unquiet world.

The Enlightenment of Sympathy reclaims the sentimentalist theory of reflective autonomy as a resource for enriching social science, normative theory, and political practice today. The sentimentalist description of the reflective process is more empirically accurate than the competing rationalist description, and can guide scientists investigating the processes by which the mind formulates moral and political principles. Yet the theory is much more than merely descriptive, and can also contribute to the philosophical project of finding principles--including principles of justice--that wield genuine normative authority. Enlightenment sentimentalism demonstrates that emotion is necessarily central to our civic life, and shows how our reflective sentiments can counterbalance the unreflective feelings that might otherwise lead our political principles astray.

Each book in this series is designed to make available to students important new work on key historical problems and periods that they encounter. Each volume, devoted to a central topic or theme, contains specially comisssioned essays from scholars in the relevant field. These provide an assessment of a particular aspect, pointing out areas of development and controversy and indicating where conclusions can be drawn or where further work is necessary, while an editorial introduction reviews the problem or period as a whole. In this text the contributors assess reform and reformers in late 18th century Europe, covering such topics as Catherine the Great, the Danish reformers, the Habsburg Monarchy and events in Spain and Italy.

During the period of the Baroque and Enlightenment the word “emotion”, denoting passions and feelings, came into usage, albeit in an irregular fashion. “Emotion” ultimately emerged as a term in its own right, and evolved in English from meaning physical agitation to describe mental feeling. However, the older terminology of “passions” and “affections” continued as the dominant discourse structuring thinking about feeling and its wider religious, political, social, economic, and moral imperatives. The emotional cultures described in these essays enable some comparative discussion about the history of emotions, and particularly the causes and consequences of emotional change in the larger cultural contexts of the Baroque and Enlightenment. Emotions research has enabled a rethinking of dominant narratives of the period-of histories of revolution, state-building, the rise of the public sphere, religious and scientific transformation, and more. As a new and dynamic field, the essays here are just the beginning of a much bigger history of emotions.

Did women have an Enlightenment? This path-breaking volume of interdisciplinary essays by forty leading scholars provides a detailed picture of the controversial, innovative role played by women and gender issues in the age of light.