In Praise of Ordinary People

Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 The “Simple Burgher” of D. V. Coornhert (1522–1590): A Dutch Freethinker Opens the Door to a New Age

Chapter 3 Common People as Individuals: Hobbes’s Normative Approach to the Ordinary Mind

Chapter 4 News as a Path to Independence: Merchant Correspondence and the Exchange of News during the Dutch Revolt

Chapter 5 “Ordinary” People and Philosophers in the Laboratories and Workshops of the Early Industrial Revolution

Chapter 6 Accounting and Accountability in Dutch Civic Life

Chapter 8 The Populist Voice of the Early Enlightenment

Chapter 9 “This Fleshlike Isle”: The Voluptuous Body of the People in Dutch Pamphlets, Novels, and Plays, 1660–1730

Chapter 10 Ordinary People in the New World: The City of Amsterdam, Colonial Policy, and Initiatives from Below, 1656–1664

Chapter 11 Depression and Evangelicalism in the Family of Esther Tuke

Chapter 12 Self-Discipline and the Struggle for the Middle in Eighteenth-Century Britain