History II / The Late Eighteenth Century and the Debate over Modernity
Practice question · Put in order

Arrange these eighteenth-century developments, earliest first.

Hints
  1. Two of these belong to the encyclopaedia project and three to Habsburg or Prussian affairs.
  2. The Encyclopédie ran 1751 to 1772; Joseph’s abolition 1781; Kant 1784; Joseph’s death 1790.
Show the answer
  1. The first volume of the Encyclopédie appears
  2. Joseph II abolishes serfdom in his hereditary lands
  3. Kant publishes "What Is Enlightenment?"
  4. The Encyclopédie’s final volumes of plates are completed
  5. Joseph II dies and much of his programme is reversed
Why

The ordering is a warning about placing the plates. The Encyclopédie’s final volumes come out in 1772, before Joseph’s reforms and before Kant’s essay, so the great synthesising work of the Enlightenment precedes both its most famous definition and its most ambitious application by a decade or more.

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