Critique of Judgment
1790 · 448 pages
Beauty sits in no object, yet you expect everyone to agree with you. Kant grounds that strange demand, and shows why a raging ocean enlarges the person watching it rather than crushing him.
★ 7.5
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1790s
1790 – 1799
Showing 10 books from the 1790s
The Life of Samuel Johnson
1791 · 1408 pages
Boswell met Samuel Johnson, who had written the English dictionary, in 1763 and wrote down his talk for twenty years. Johnson steps off the page as somebody you have actually met.
★ 7.3
Jacques the Fatalist
1796 · 261 pages
Jacques and his master ride along while Jacques tries to tell his love story. Everyone interrupts, the narrator taunts you, and the interruptions become Diderot's case against free will.
★ 7.1
Reflections on the Revolution in France
1790 · 400 pages
Modern conservatism begins here, in Burke's fury at revolutionaries who tore down old institutions for the sake of an abstraction. Society is a partnership between the dead, the living, and the unborn.
★ 7.1
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
1798 · 76 pages
Stopped outside a wedding, a guest must hear an old sailor out: he shot an albatross for no reason, and the ship fell becalmed with water everywhere and none to drink.
★ 6.8
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
1790 · 441 pages
Seventeen and running from his apprenticeship, Franklin walks into Philadelphia carrying three bread rolls. He later ruled a daily chart of thirteen virtues, and every American self-improvement book works from that design.
★ 6.7
On the Aesthetic Education of Man
1794 · 224 pages
Watching the French Revolution collapse into terror, Schiller concluded that reason cannot free people whose feelings stay uneducated. Beauty does it, through play, and Romanticism built its case for art on that claim.
★ 6.2
An Essay on the Principle of Population
1798 · 172 pages
Population multiplies faster than food supply, Malthus argued, so misery and restraint are permanent conditions of human life, not problems reform can fix. Darwin read him and found natural selection.
★ 6.2
Justine
1791 · 336 pages
Twelve years old and orphaned, Justine chooses virtue and is punished for it by monks, surgeons, and noblemen who argue at length that nature rewards cruelty. Napoleon had Sade arrested for writing it.
★ 4.2
Philosophy in the Boudoir
1795 · 173 pages
Two libertines take a girl of fifteen through atheism, pleasure and cruelty, pausing for a pamphlet urging the Republic to abolish God with the king. Sade takes reason to its worst conclusion.
★ 4.2