What Makes a Compassionate World: Sophie de Grouchy’s Visionary 18th-Century Appeal to Parents and Teachers

The morning after the 2016 presidential election, I awoke to terrifying flashbacks of my childhood under a totalitarian dictatorship. Desperate for assurance that the future need not hold the total moral collapse of democracy, I reached out to my eldest friend for perspective. Months shy of 100, Helen had been born into a world war, survived the Holocaust, and fled from Poland to America without speaking a word of English before becoming a professor of English literature for half a century.

I a...