Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

Catherine is once more being taken seriously as an intellectual, engagee and writer (an inveterate `scribbler', as she called herself and a ruler addicted to `legislomania'). Committed to the values of the philosophes, she believed fervently in the power of enlightened ideas and legislation and energetically strove to put theory into practice by influencing and forming a `public opinion' in Russia sympathetic to her objectives. She wrote moral tales for her grandchildren, school syllabuses and mildly satirical periodicals and comedies for her subjects in the lasting basic conviction that common sense, reason and moral conduct could lea