This volume we ask the question, “How we should live?,” in conversation with texts that confront us with the rise of modern Europe: the definitive transition from the Middle Ages to our contemporary world of global capital and the bureaucratic nation-state. This is the time when the nations of western Europe come to have a disproportionate influence on the course of world history. These are the centuries of the Protestant Reformation, the Age of Discovery, the wars of religion, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment—along with Romanticism as a reaction to, yet still a strange ally of, Enlightenment.

The Great Conversation Volume III features excerpts from the following texts and authors alongside insightful introductions and necessary context for the new reader:

Martin Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian

Erasmus’ The Sileni of Alcibiades

Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis

William Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan

Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, Part 5

Blaise Pascal’s Provincial Letters, Letter V

Voltaire’s Twenty-fifth Letter (Letters on the English)

Benjamin Franklin’s The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile 287

Immanuel Kant’s Essays

Germaine de Sta ̈el’s The Influence of the Passions on the Happiness of Individuals and Nations

Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage