Antoine Lilti, in conversation with Carl Wennerlind and Joanna Stalnaker
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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 about “The Long Shadow of the Enlightenment” 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.
