Enlightenment Virtue, 1680-1794
Edited by James Fowler and Marine Ganofsky
Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment 2020:03
ISBN: 9781789620412, 296 pp., £65.00
In a speech delivered in 1794, roughly one year after the execution of Louis XVI, Robespierre boldly declared Terror to be an ‘emanation of virtue’. In adapting the concept of virtue to Republican ends, Robespierre was drawing on traditions associated with ancient Greece and Rome. But Republican tradition formed only one of many strands in debates concerning virtue in France and elsewhere in Europe, from 1680 to the Revolution.
This collection focuses on moral-philosophical and classical-republican uses of ‘virtue’ in this period – one that is often associated with a ‘crisis of the European mind’. It also considers in what ways debates concerning virtue involved gendered perspectives. The texts discussed are drawn from a range of genres, from plays and novels to treatises, memoirs, and libertine literature. They include texts by authors such as Diderot, Laclos, and Madame de Staël, plus other, lesser-known texts that broaden the volume’s perspective.
Collectively, the contributors to the volume highlight the central importance of virtue for an understanding of an era in which, as Daniel Brewer argues in the closing chapter, ‘the political could not be thought outside its moral dimension, and morality could not be separated from inevitable political consequences’.
- A timely contribution to debates on the ‘legacy’ of the Enlightenment era.
- An innovative contribution to a field which has enjoyed a resurgence since the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre’s study After Virtue.
- The contributions gathered in this volume examine virtue via questions of religion, philosophy, ethics, gender and politics.
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Table of Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
James Fowler and Marine Ganofsky, Introduction: virtue and the secular turn, 1680-1794
Michael Moriarty, Virtue before the Enlightenment
Nicholas Treuherz, Vertu et Lumières: Bayle’s ‘virtuous atheist’ and its afterlives
James Fowler, Secular virtue: echoes of Shaftesbury in Diderot
Alicia C. Montoya, From the religious virtues to Enlightenment virtue
Ioana Galleron, Bernard-Joseph Saurin, the comédie de moeurs and the civic function of plays
Karen Nehlsen Manna, Acting honnête: effeminacy, masculinity and the ethos of social virtue in Enlightenment comedy
Jean-Alexandre Perras, The softness of the petit-maître and the decay of virtus
Mathilde Chollet, ‘La vera nobiltà non consiste in altro che nella virtù’: a woman’s view on virtue, or Henriette de Marans’s nobility
Marine Ganofsky, Virtue and invisibility: libertine variations on the myth of Gyges
Lydia Vázquez, Female virtue and bliss in the eighteenth century
Pierre Saint-Amand, The politics of virtue: Réflexions sur le procès de la reine by Mme de Staël
Patrice Higonnet, Robespierre’s virtue in Marx and Tocqueville
Daniel Brewer, Virtue and the ethics of the virtual
Summaries
List of works cited
Index
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James Fowler is currently Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Department of French, King's College, London. Publications includeVoicing desire: family and sexuality in Diderot's narrative (Oxford, 2000); The Libertine's Nemesis: The Prude in 'Clarissa' and the Roman libertin (Oxford, 2011); Richardson and the Philosophes (Oxford, 2014); and New Essays on Diderot (ed., Cambridge, 2011; 2014).
Marine Ganofsky is a lecturer in French literature at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the eighteenth century and its quest for happiness. Her first book examined libertine nights (Night in French libertine fiction, OUSE, 2018). She has edited a collection of libertine stories (Petits soupers libertins, Paris, 2016) and co-edited the volume Le Siècle de la légèreté (OUSE, 2019).
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The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.