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The eighteenth century is often remembered for the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that ranged widely across Europe and beyond. In this lecture block we use ideas as a starting-point for exploring eighteenth-century history as a whole. The first lecture focuses on the ideas themselves. Many of these ideas—such as free trade, experimental science, and a European Union—seem surprisingly modern. But we can only make sense of the Enlightenment as a whole by recalling the events of the preceding centuries. Eighteenth-century thinkers were responding to the events in religious, political, economic and global history that we have covered so far in this module.

The seminar looks at a famous novel by the French thinker Voltaire, first published in French in 1759. The novel is a commentary--both intentional and unintentional--on wider events in European and American history. This is one of a number of 'philosophical novels' published in eighteenth-century Europe. In these works, philosophers used a relatively new literary genre (the novel) to get their ideas across to a wide audience.