Abstract
This year's lecture continues our reflection on the languages of the universal and the legacy of the Enlightenment. This introductory session begins with a reminder that current debates on " l'universalisme " combine two registers : the place of Western modern values in a globalized and plural world, on the one hand ; the place of minority groups and multiple identities in modern liberal societies, on the other. In both cases, reference to the Enlightenment has become ubiquitous to justify " universalist "positions, even as eighteenth-century philosophers battled against the theological and ecclesial universalism of the Christian Church. They deployed different languages of the universal, but these were competing and sometimes incompatible.
Last year's lecture identified three languages : cosmopolitan universalism, often associated with the work of Kant, which bases morality on individual reason, and tolerance on freedom of conscience and diversity of belief ;historical universalism, articulated around the notion of civilization, which describes a process leading all societies from the savage state to the civilized state ;critical universalism, which denounces situations of injustice in the name of a common humanity.
The French Revolution reconfigured these languages, articulating them in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. However, this synthesis reveals contradictions between the universalism of rights, which is addressed to all, and national sovereignty, which founds a specific community. The universalist promise of the Revolution could not be kept, as it remained caught up in the " paradox ofrepublican emancipation " (G. Rousselière), which in turn produced exclusion, and in the historical thinking of civilization. Revolutionaries were led to set France up as a model of freedom, at the risk of giving rise to an imperialist universalism.
This year's lecture will examine how these discourses of the universal have been transmitted to us, and how they have continued to evolve over the past two centuries.
