This course on 19th-century European thought and culture is presented in three major sections:
- the reaction against the Enlightenment, as exemplified by the conservatism in thought of Edmund Burke and G.W.F. Hegel and the romanticism in the arts of Jane Austen and William Wordsworth
- the response to the twin challenges of democracy and industrialism, with the focus on the liberalism of John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville and the socialism of the Utopian Socialists and Karl Marx
- the triumph of science (especially Darwinian science) and the reactions to this triumph by a number of individual artists and thinkers who anticipate 20th-century modernism: John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche.