SOURCE: “Images of the Enlightenment: Alfieri's Agamennone,” in Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, The Voltaire Foundation, 1992, pp. 1547-50.

In the following essay, O'Grady discusses Alfieri's Agamennone and its concern with Enlightenment principles, claiming the tragedy portrays the failure of reason to maintain social order.

Of pre-Romantic Italian writers, the dramatist and political thinker Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803)¹ best communicates the moral, political and philosophical aspects of the Age of Reason. He cannot be regarded as a defender of rational theories or systems, but rather he dramatically demonstrates his opinion that Reason is unable to maintain social order. The formulation of Alfieri's political ideology came in the wake of his reading Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu. His attitude to enlightened despotism is to be found in his autobiography, Vita,² begun in Paris in 1790 and completed five months before his death; in his treatise on tyranny, Della tirannide, modelled on...