The Legacy of the Enlightenment: Ambivalences of Modernity

The Enlightenment has come under substantial attack over the past several years, with some going so far as to recommend leaving its thinkers—and their Eurocentric prejudices—behind. On the other hand, the most orthodox defenders of the Enlightenment insist that its values are not just foundational but indispensable and that leaving them behind means opening the door to nihilism and relativism. For Antoine Lilti, one of the leading scholars of the French Enlightenment, both sides are wrong.

In The Legacy of the Enlightenment: Ambivalences of Modernity, Lilti emphasizes a non-dogmatic, non-ideological view of the Enlightenment—one that sees its legacy as a critical, subversive attitude that can and should serve as its own best critic. He engages with everyone from Rousseau and Kant to Foucault and Habermas, offering a new reading of the Enlightenment that breathes life into old debates and offers an alternative way to engage with canonical thinkers and traditions that is both honest about the past and useful for the future.

This event is the first in a series of three panel discussions to be held at the Maison Française this fall, featuring new books on the ideas, history, and legacy of the Enlightenment and Revolution. Written by distinguished specialists of eighteenth-century French literature, history, and political thought, these books shed new light on the ways enlightened and revolutionary ideals have shaped our modern world, while also interrogating their limits and fragility. Such discussions have never been more critical, at a time when the ideals of democracy, equality, freedom of speech and thought, rationality, and scientific knowledge are under attack.

Antoine Lilti is the Chair of History of the Enlightenment 18th to 21st Century at the Collège de France. He was a lecturer at École Nationale Supérieure - Rue d’Ulm, then Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales from 2011. From 2006 to 2011, he edited the journal Annales Histoire, sciences sociales. Since 2013, he has directed the collection L'épreuve de l'histoire, published by Fayard. Lilti’s work focuses on the social, cultural and intellectual history and legacy of the Enlightenment. He first studied the sociability practices of aristocratic and literate elites, then set out to show the emergence, in the 18th century, of a new form of recognition, celebrity, linked to changes in public space and individual identities. His previous books include Figures publiques: L’invention de la célébrité (1750-1850); and Le monde des salons: Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle.

The Legacy of the Enlightenment is his most recent book.

Joanna Stalnaker is Professor of French at Columbia. Her work focuses on Enlightenment literature and philosophy. Her newest book, The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death, will be coming out in October 2025, and her book launch will take place at the Maison Française on November 13.

Carl Wennerlind is Professor of History at Barnard College, with a specialization in the history of early modern Europe and a focus on intellectual history and political economy. His books include Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720; A Philosopher's Economist: Hume and the Rise of Capitalism, with Margaret Schabas; and Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis, with Fredrik Albritton Jonsson.

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