Ritchie Robertson: The Enlightenment and the Pursuit of Happiness

ORIGINALLY RELEASED 22 FEBRUARY 2024 · 53 MIN · SEASON 1, EPISODE 20

Professor Ritchie Robertson joins Samuel Woodall to explore why the pursuit of happiness offers a revealing way into the ideas, practices and tensions of the Enlightenment.

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Episode summary

Rather than treating the Enlightenment as a single abstract doctrine, Ritchie Robertson approaches it through the practical pursuit of human happiness. The discussion examines how writers and reformers negotiated religion, reason and passion, and how literature gave emotional and imaginative form to new accounts of individual and social flourishing.

The conversation also addresses gender and sexuality, bureaucracy, travel writing and cultural diversity. It shows an Enlightenment made up of competing practices and aspirations, including projects of social reform as well as the administrative systems and exclusions that complicated them.

Questions explored

• Why is happiness a useful organising idea for the Enlightenment?
• How did Enlightenment writers understand reason and emotion?
• What roles did literature, gender and sexuality play in projects of reform?
• How should we assess bureaucracy and cultural diversity within Enlightenment thought?

Participants

• Samuel Woodall: Host of Beyond the Text, intellectual historian and PhD candidate at the University of Buckingham.
• Ritchie Robertson: Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Queen’s College and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Episode chapters

• 0:00 Exploring Enlightenment Through Conversations
• 6:07 Enlightenment Authors and Ideas Explored
• 20:32 Emotions and Literature in Enlightenment
• 27:27 Enlightenment Practices and Social Reform
• 41:09 Critique of Enlightenment and Bureaucracy
• 51:46 Perspectives on the Enlightenment

Sources and further reading

• Ritchie Robertson, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 (London: Allen Lane, 2020).
• Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Transcript and original show notes

The original Buzzsprout page contains the complete episode description and any transcript or chapter material supplied with the recording. Open the original episode page.