HY 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 54: Maria Edgeworth, Print Culture, American Philosophical Society
30 May 2018
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I.The Radical Enlightenment Rousseau and Wollstonecraft
. How revolutionary was the Enlightenment?
A. The world of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
1. General observations
2. Quarreled with and contradicted other philosophes
3. Attacked privilege and believed in the goodness of humanity
4. Introduced the notion of "sensibility" (the cult of feeling)
5. The first to speak of popular sovereignty and democracy
6. The most utopian of the philosophes
B. The Social Contract (1762)
1. "Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains"
2. The origins of government
3. The legitimacy of government
4. Social inequality and private property
5. Legitimate authority arises from the people alone
. Sovereignty should not be divided among different branches of the government
a. Exercising sovereignty transformed the nation
b. The national community would be united by the "general will"
.Citizens bound by mutual obligation rather than coercive laws
i.Citizens' common interests represented in the whole
C. Emile (1762)
1. Story of a boy educated in the "school of nature"
2. Children should not be forced to reason early in life
3. The aim was moral autonomy and good citizenship
4. Women useful as mothers and wives only
5. "Natural" is better, simpler, uncorrupted
D. Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761)
1. Seventy editions in thirty years
2. Domestic and maternal virtues
3. Humans ruled by their hearts as much as their heads
4. Middle-class and aristocratic sensibility: spontaneous feelings
5. The Enlightenment and gender
. Education as key to social progress—education for all?
a. Were men and women different?
b. Were gender differences natural, or socially created?
E. The world of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
1. Rousseau's sharpest critic
2. A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)
. Republican ideas
a. Spoke against inequality and artificial distinctions of rank, birth, or wealth
b. Society ought to seek "the perfection of our nature and capability of happiness"
c. Women had the same innate capacity for reason and self-government as men
d. Virtue the same thing for men and women
e. Relations between the sexes ought to be based on equality
3. The family
. The legal inequalities of marriage law
a. Women taught to be dependent and seductive in order to win husbands
b. Education has to promote liberty and self-reliance
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