Abstract
In this lecture, I will show that the changes in the European intellectual world, studied in the first lecture, drew the attention of XVIIIᵉ centuryauthors to the specificity of society as a phenomenon. They then began to consider the latter as an entity independent of political life, with its own rules and mechanisms. I will highlight the developments that contributed to making society an explicit object of study : primo : the lived experience of new forms of social interaction ; secundo : the attempts of the governments of the time to organize information about their populations and prepare inventories of their resources ; tertio : the new outlook on the non-European world and the discovery of new forms of social organization. By way of illustration, I'll be talking about two controversial works, both published in 1721 : Montesquieu's Persian Letters and Christian Wolff's lecture on Chinese philosophy, both of which examined the following question : can a virtuous society maintain itself without religion ?
