A gap divides modern ideas of genius from the sentimental conceptions of the 1760s and 1770s. Though talent was a common feature, musical genius for Rousseau and Diderot was integrally related to expression, affective identification with a community, and an orientation towards ‘the people’. Also important was ‘enthusiasm’, originally a type of religious inspiration fostered after 1700 within radical Protestant groups such as Count Zinzendorf’s Moravians, who radically challenged contemporary ideas of masculinity, sexuality and religious faith. Enthusiasm’s secularization with Goethe and Herder initiated the countercultural ‘period of genius’ (Genieperiode) later known as the Sturm und Drang. Its composers, such as J. M. Kraus, Neefe and Reichardt, lavished attention on popular, commercial forms such as German comic opera and ‘popular song’ (Volkslied) – priorities only challenged when the movement’s opponents such as J. N. Forkel tactically redefined ‘genius’ to centre it on technical mastery rather than inspiration and expression.

In order to understand the Romantic fascination with prophets, we begin with an influential eighteenth-century figure poised on the cusp of neoclassicism and Romanticism: the English biblical scholar Robert Lowth – also a medieval historian, a shrewd politician, and the author of a bestselling English grammar handbook, who was destined to become the Bishop of London. Lowth is a key figure in the creation of the modern “poetics of prophecy.” Taking an approach which would become known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as “the Bible as literature,” Lowth initiated and represents an important new way of regarding the Bible aesthetically, one which we encounter through his construction of Isaiah as a strong prophet. Yet examining the fissures in Lowth’s ideal Isaiah – who he reads as a perfect combination of elegance and sublimity – can also help us think more critically about the literary study of the Bible.

The chapter provides a study of François Hemsterhuis’ affinities with and influence on Jacobi’s Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn. Both Hemsterhuis and Charles Bonnet significantly influenced Jacobi’s thought and the development of German idealism while providing the foundation for an alternative understanding of Spinoza.

In Germany the years of the First World War saw an overwhelming outpouring of verse, fired for the most part by intense patriotic enthusiasm around 1914. The lyric form provided both an immediate outlet for ordinary Germans to record their experiences and feelings, but also ready-made traditional models to shape those experiences. Alongside chauvinistic hymns by poets who remain, to all intents and purposes, ‘lost voices’, were soldier-poets, writing from the front – some of them prolific and enormously popular at the time, yet now almost completely forgotten, others still read today. But there were also worker poets, other critical voices, expressly anti-war poets and women poets who focused often on the victims left behind. Later too came the satiricalor epic voices. German poetry of the period is inevitably mixed up also with Expressionism, which made for a more radical formal experimentation than in many other national literatures at the time.

This chapter explores the complex relation between Kant and common-sense philosophy.In the Prolegomena, Kant is notoriously dismissive of thinkers like Beattie and Oswald, but his attitude toward common-sense philosophy is more sympathetic than these remarks might suggest. Kant shares some of the common-sense philosophers’ worries about the vanities of metaphysics, but sees them as caught up in just the kind of ‘enthusiasm’ that besets more traditional metaphysicians.The essay suggests that for Kant, the proper strategy against either form of enthusiasm is to deflate it using raillery and humor, and the paper is devoted to providing a fascinating literary analysis of the Prolegomena, to show just how the rhetorical strategies of the work can contribute to a greater understanding of the critical project as a whole.

This chapter traces the fortunes of Aaron Hill’s English translation (1735) of Voltaire’s tragedy Zaïre (1732), from its first performance under Hill’s direction outside the patent theatres to David Garrick’s reworking of it at Drury Lane. I show that Zara’s scepticism of established religion and her father’s deathbed proselytising are used by Hill to produce what his friend John Dennis called an ‘enthusiastic’ passion and suggest that Voltaire’s work appealed to Hill for its handling of religious material capable of producing extreme sequences of sublime emotions. At the same time, Hill’s Zara is also an exposition of what Hill described as ‘dramatic passions’. Those who read, saw, or performed Zara could witness the outward marks of many passions and trace on stage and on the page their performance through transition to the very instant. Such opportunities made the play perfect for what Hill called an ‘Experiment’ on English tastes and acting. When Garrick came to revive this experiment in the 1750s, its passions become the property of Garrick himself, as he rewrote sections of the play to favour his character of Lusignan.

Few, if any, political thinkers of the eighteenth century dealt as thoroughly and extensively with party as David Hume (1711–76). This chapter considers Hume’s first batch of essays on British politics, published in 1741–2. Hume analysed how the Whig–Tory and Court–Country alignments were integral to British party politics, with the former dividing the political nation along dynastic and religious lines and the latter being a natural expression of the workings of the mixed constitution and interparliamentary conflict. His analysis can be read as a compromise between Bolingbroke and Walpole. Yet it was something more than that – and arguably the most ambitious attempt to make sense of party in British politics to date.

In this chapter I argue that despite Hume’s explicit criticisms of enthusiasm and superstition in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (EPM), his more important targets are the orthodox and moderate Protestants of his time who would also scorn enthusiasm and superstition, and those philosophers who mixed Protestant accounts of virtue and duty with their philosophy. I show that Hume rejects central aspects of two prominent Protestant texts, The Whole Duty of Man and the Westminster Confession of Faith, but also borrows some of their language and mimics their style. Hume rejects The Whole Duty of Man’s catalog of duties limited to voluntary traits, and the Confession’s account of the sole purpose of man as well as its view of human nature. Still, in EPM Hume seems to use the style and language of these texts in order to be equally influential, to push religion back into the temple (and out of the public space), and to bring his moral philosophy out of the closet into common life in order to give it more extensive recognition as the accurate description of virtue and vice. EPM, therefore, is Hume’s own secular but religiously styled credo on duty and virtue.

“Crowd Involvements and Attachments,” analyzes and classifies group affect and other forms of thinking together, such as Heraclitean flows of group thought, sensation, and experience made available through new structures of collective feeling. The chapter counters arguments about the role of the leader with the proposition that the crowd may behave as an assemblage governed by an attractor, figured by characters such as James Wait, aboard the Narcissus, or Stevie in The Secret Agent. The function of Bloom for the crowd in “Cyclops” speaks to the crowd’s management of its anxieties and their effects. The chapter explores the interpenetration of public and private spaces in Sean O’Casey’s plays to understand crowds’ precise attachments to and exercise of design over the histories and semiotics of the metropolis, testing whether and in what manner they gain the sense of a shared life and act as a performative mass body.

Chapter 3 focuses on Jenner and the discovery of vaccination, specifically his translation of the vague notion that cowpox prevented smallpox into a more precise body of knowledge which could distinguish between varieties of cowpox and be the basis for the development of protocols for its effective use. Given the rarity of cowpox, his use of humanised cowpox (vaccine), propagated on children, was to prove critical to the success and viability of the practice. Publishing his findings in 1798, Jenner had to wait a year for his new mode of prophylaxis to gain acceptance. Initially, London-based physicians – Woodville conducting clinical trials and Pearson distributing vaccine – made much of the running. Jenner, however, reasserted his leadership in the field and made championship of vaccination his principal occupation. After considering reports on Jenner’s discovering of cowpox inoculation and making it available to the world, the British parliament granted him a premium in 1802. The Royal Jennerian Society was established in 1803 to promote and support the practice.

Kant holds that the origin of our propensity to evil arises in connection with our unsociable sociability. The effective response to it, therefore, must also be social. We must leave the ethical state of nature and join with others in voluntary ethical community, where our shared ends, conceived as the highest good, under the legislation of a divine lawgiver will promote moral progress among human beings. The existing communities of this kind are churches and ecclesiastical faiths, which fall short of their religious vocation but can and should be reformed so as to live up to it. The relation of rational religion to revealed religion is therefore intended by Kant to be dynamic, with the interpretation of revealed religion enriching rational religion and the reform of revealed religion bringing rational and revealed religion into closer harmony, leading gradually toward the founding of the Kingdom of God on earth.

Chapter Five investigates the idea that while African Americans exhibit an anger gap in politics, they also demonstrate an enthusiasm advantage. With aid of survey data, I demonstrate that across different political eras that carry positive prospects for African Americans—from Clinton to Obama—greater proportions of black individuals exhibit pride relative to comparable whites. Further, these pride exhibits a stronger mobilizing effect on black participation relative to whites. This chapter also highlights the findings from a second original experimental study, in which black subjects exhibit a uniquely motivating effect of hope on their participation in a local issue area. This chapter ultimately illustrates that the boost to black participation accrued from the enthusiasm advantage is generally not sufficient to balance out the disparity caused by the anger gap. Whereas pride exhibits participation-stimulating effects for African Americans that are on par with the effects of anger, the potential mobilizing power of hope on black participation is limited to very specific contexts.

Chapter Two examines the psychology of anger, its expected effects on behavior, and the prevalence of anger in political messaging. Drawing on different traditions in social psychology, this chapter breaks down the distinct attitudes underlying the emotion of anger, and I provide a theoretical account of why the emotional sentiment of resignation cultivated among African Americans inhibits the emergence of anger as this group surveys the political environment. I investigate a range of campaign messages and speeches from political elites over the years to highlight the why’s and how’s behind elites’ attempts to activate various emotions within the intended public—specifically anger. I conduct emotion discourse analyses of these messages in order to identify the emotional sentiments that are cultivated and reinforced within primarily white and black audiences. The chapter begins the exploration of the racial divide in the activation of political anger by surveying trends from the open-ended findings from the original survey experiment titled the 2018 Race, Anger and Participation (RAP) Study.

The historical question of the personal and theological relationship between Martin Luther and John Calvin has long been freighted with larger questions of Evangelical identity. Calvin, in his published and epistolary rhetoric, deliberately constructed the image of a positive but critical attitude toward Luther, which he used to establish his own place in the Reformation. Luther’s own positive but qualified opinion of Calvin, however, came to be distorted by transmission by different parties in the theological disputes of the succeeding generation.1