A dual biography crafted around the famous encounter between the French philosopher who wrote about power and the Russian empress who wielded it with great aplomb.

In October 1773, after a grueling trek from Paris, the aged and ailing Denis Diderot stumbled from a carriage in wintery St. Petersburg. The century’s most subversive thinker, Diderot arrived as the guest of its most ambitious and admired ruler, Empress Catherine of Russia. What followed was unprecedented: more than forty private meetings, stretching over nearly four months, between these two extraordinary figures. Diderot had come from Paris in order to guide—or so he thought—the woman who had become the continent’s last great hope for an enlightened ruler. But as it soon became clear, Catherine had a very different understanding not just of her role but of his as well. Philosophers, she claimed, had the luxury of writing on unfeeling paper. Rulers had the task of writing on human skin, sensitive to the slightest touch.

Diderot and Catherine’s series of meetings, held in her private chambers at the Hermitage, captured the imagination of their contemporaries. While heads of state like Frederick of Prussia feared the consequences of these conversations, intellectuals like Voltaire hoped they would further the goals of the Enlightenment.

In Catherine & Diderot, Robert Zaretsky traces the lives of these two remarkable figures, inviting us to reflect on the fraught relationship between politics and philosophy, and between a man of thought and a woman of action.

The Catholic Enlightenment: A Global Anthology presents readers with accessible, translated selections from the writings of fifteen major Catholic Enlightenment authors. These early modern authors include women, priests, lay intellectuals, and bishops. Twelve of these figures are being brought into English for the first time. The purpose of the volume is to provide students, scholars, and interested non-specialists with a single point of departure to delve into the primary sources of the Catholic Enlightenment. This anthology shows the geographical and intellectual diversity of the Catholic Enlightenment, while also demonstrating significant threads of commonality in intellectual orientation. One strength of this volume is the geographical spread of the figures considered. Included are Catholic thinkers from England, the United States, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, France, Portugal, and the Italian and German-speaking lands. Another strength of this volume is the breadth of subject matter treated – it features pastoral letters, mystical tracts, pedagogical treatises, political manifestos, and theological works. These texts elucidate Catholic Enlightenment views on topics such as the history of women’s education, liturgy and devotions, and the relationship between church and state. The co-editors, Ulrich Lehner and Shaun Blanchard, have assembled a team of international scholars from Europe and the Americas for this exciting project. Lehner is one of the central scholars behind the renewed interest in the Catholic Enlightenment. He co-edits the volume, contributes to the introduction, and introduces and translates two significant German-speaking figures. Shaun Blanchard, who has recently published a monograph on radical Catholic Enlightenment figures, also co-edits, contributes selections from two English-speaking figures and has completed the first English translation of a section of Lodovico Muratori’s landmark On the Regulated Devotion of a Christian since 1789.

Christian Felix Weiße (1726–1804) is best known as a dramatist and an influential children’s writer of the Enlightenment period. This volume is the first book to explore his singularly extensive output as a literary translator. Tom Zille investigates the conditions which allowed Weiße to become the most prolific German translator of English literature in the eighteenth century, a popular translator of French drama, and an influential editor and “entrepreneur” of the translations of others. Drawing on previously unpublished correspondence, the study examines Weiße’s wide-ranging professional networks as a cultural mediator of European significance. Special attention is paid to his role in the German reception of the Ossian cycle of poems, his introduction of English children’s literature to Germany, his translations of popular prose, and the intersections between his original writing and translations.

The idea that society progresses through stages of development, from savagery to civilization, arose in eighteenth-century Europe. Albert Craig traces how Fukuzawa Yukichi, deeply influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment, “translated” the idea for Japanese society, both enriching and challenging the concept.

Fukuzawa, an official in the Tokugawa government, saw his career collapse when the shogunate ended in 1867. Reinventing himself as a thinker and writer, he made his life work the translation and interpretation of the Western idea of the stages of civilization. He interpreted key Scottish intellectuals— Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, John Millar; relied on American geographies to help explain how societies progress; and focused on invention as a key to civilization.

By defining the role of “less developed” nations in the world order, Fukuzawa added a new dimension to the stage theory. But by the end of the 1880s, he had come to dismiss the philosophy of natural rights as “the fatuous idealism of Christian ministers.” Though civilization—as represented by Britain—was still his goal for Japan, he no longer saw the West as a uniformly beneficial moral force.

This engaging history offers an illuminating look at an important figure and the world of ideas in nineteenth-century Japan.

Sociologist Robert Wuthnow notes remarkable similarities in the social conditions surrounding three of the greatest challenges to the status quo in the development of modern society—the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the rise of Marxist socialism.

A bold new look at war and diplomacy in Europe that traces the idea of a unified continent in attempts since the eighteenth century to engineer lasting peace.

Political peace in Europe has historically been elusive and ephemeral. Stella Ghervas shows that since the eighteenth century, European thinkers and leaders in pursuit of lasting peace fostered the idea of European unification.

Bridging intellectual and political history, Ghervas draws on the work of philosophers from Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who wrote an early eighteenth-century plan for perpetual peace, to Rousseau and Kant, as well as statesmen such as Tsar Alexander I, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Robert Schuman, and Mikhail Gorbachev. She locates five major conflicts since 1700 that spurred such visionaries to promote systems of peace in Europe: the War of the Spanish Succession, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Each moment generated a “spirit” of peace among monarchs, diplomats, democratic leaders, and ordinary citizens. The engineers of peace progressively constructed mechanisms and institutions designed to prevent future wars.

Arguing for continuities from the ideals of the Enlightenment, through the nineteenth-century Concert of Nations, to the institutions of the European Union and beyond, Conquering Peace illustrates how peace as a value shaped the idea of a unified Europe long before the EU came into being. Today the EU is widely criticized as an obstacle to sovereignty and for its democratic deficit. Seen in the long-range perspective of the history of peacemaking, however, this European society of states emerges as something else entirely: a step in the quest for a less violent world.