This book deals with a question that currently has a great deal of resonance among historians, feminists, and literary scholars: How was the nature of women redefined and debated during the French Enlightenment? Instead of treating the Enlightenment in the usual manner, as a challenge to orthodox ideas and social conventions, Lieselotte Steinbrugge interprets it as a deviation from a position staked out in the seventeenth century, namely, "the mind has no sex." In breaking with that view, the philosophes shifted the debate to categories like morality and sensitivity and took up economic issues as well. They inadvertently backed women into the corner of domesticity, where middle-class women remained for some time to come.

In diesem Band werden die beiden Diskurse zur Zivilisationskritik von Jean-Jacques Rousseau nah am Text und in einzelnen Schritten kommentiert. Rousseaus These lautet, dass sich der Mensch durch die technisch-wissenschaftlichen Fortschritte zunehmend von der eigenen Natur entfremdet und dadurch pervertiert. Das Beispiel dieses Autors zeigt, wie bereits wahrend der Epoche der Aufklarung die kritische Reflexion der modernen Zivilisation beginnt."