Abstract
The Enlightenment is as relevant as ever. They are extolled as the living source of modern values of freedom, tolerance and equality, or, conversely, denounced as the ideology of Western imperialism and the origin of a thoughtless cult of technological progress. How is it that an intellectual movement so deeply rooted in the social, cultural and political transformations of the 18th century can still generate so much debate today ? How can we avoid caricatures and think, without fetishism or anachronism, about the relevance of the Enlightenment ?
Historical studies have profoundly renewed our understanding of what we call the Enlightenment. They are no longer perceived as a homogeneous doctrine or as the theoretical program of a triumphant modernity, but as a set of debates, a polyphonic and critical reflection on the ambivalences of modern societies. In particular, we'll be looking at the question of scholarly authority in the public arena, which was one of the key issues for eighteenth-century philosophers confronted with the new mechanisms of opinion production.
Thinking historically about the Enlightenment means restoring its plurality. Their legacy is not a European, let alone a national, treasure. The Enlightenment, whose very sources are multiple, has been appropriated and reinterpreted in different cultural spaces. A comparative history of the Enlightenment should enable us to rethink the question of its universality.
