Online-Workshops: Inventions of Enlightenment. The emergence and use of the concepts of Lumières, Enlightenment and Aufklärung between 1800 and 1980
Inventions of Enlightenment/Inventions des Lumières
The emergence and use of the concepts of Lumières, Enlightenment and Aufklärung between 1800 and 1980
Formation et usages des notions de Lumières, Enlightenment et Aufklärung entre 1800 et 1980
Three online workshops: 18. October – 25. October – 15. November 2021
Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies (IZEA), Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, UK
Organization: Prof. Dr. Nicholas Cronk, Oxford, and Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Décultot, Halle
Few notions have played such a central role in the various fields of European intellectual, political, religious and cultural history as those of ›Lumières‹, ›Enlightenment‹ and ›Aufklärung‹. Among the vast range of meanings associated with these terms, two broad types of usage stand out. On the one hand, in a normative sense, these notions refer to a certain number of concepts, phenomena or values that are universal and un- or trans-historical. In this context, the notion of ›Enlightenment‹ is primarily understood as a principle that may be realised in all times and places. On the other hand, and inseparable from this first meaning, this notion also refers to the period when these concepts and values were supposedly elaborated and became political and social realities, that is to say a broad period loosely centred around the eighteenth century. Both these senses of the concepts of ›Lumières‹, ›Enlightenment‹ and ›Aufklärung‹ already exist in the eighteenth century. But it is from the nineteenth century in particular that they really develop, under the double impact of the historical distancing of the eighteenth century, and of the modern relevance of the ideas or values emblematically attributed to that century. The object of the proposed workshops is to organise and analyse, in their multiple developments, the meanings and functions acquired by these concepts in the period 1800–1980.
Program
18. October 2021, 13.00 – 18.00
19th century
13.00 Nicholas Cronk (Oxford) and Elisabeth Décultot (Halle)
Welcome and Introduction
13.30 Christian Helmreich (Halle)
La notion de Lumières chez Victor Cousin et François Guizot
14.15 Daniel Weidner (Halle)
Unveiling or Inventing the Enlightenment? Bruno Bauer, David Friedrich Strauss, and the Tradition of Eighteenth Century Critique
15.00 Elisabeth Décultot (Halle)
Alexis de Tocqueville et Hermann Hettner, 1856: deux historiens face au XVIIIe siècle
15.45 Coffee Break
16.15 Francesca Iannelli (Rome)
Dealing with the Aufklärung: Hegel and the Young Hegelians facing the Enlightenment
17.00 Stephane Zékian (Lyon/Paris)
Le XVIIIe siècle à l’épreuve des concours. Le cas du prix d’éloquence à l’Académie française (1844–1904)
25. October 2021, 13.00 – 18.00
19th and 20th century
13.00 Brian Young (Oxford)
After Carlyle: English notions of the Enlightenment in the nineteenth century
13.45 Andrew Kahn (Oxford)
The notion of ›prosveshchenie‹ in Russia, c. 1850–1940
14.30 Avi Lifschitz (Oxford)
Wihelm Dilthey’s ›Aufklärung‹
15.15 Coffee Break
15.45 Nicholas Cronk (Oxford)
Gustave Lanson’s ›Lumières‹
16.30 Annette Meyer (Munich)
Enlightenment as an Antidote. Forms of appropriation in the Weimar Republic
17.15 Mike Rottmann (Halle):
Historical Scholarship and Political Action. Interpreted Enlightenment after 1930: From Hannah Arendt to Gershom Scholem
15. November 2021, 13.00 – 18.00
20th century
13.00 Daniel Fulda (Halle)
»The time of enlightenment is here again« (A. Ruge). Activist Appropriations of Aufklärung in the pre-March and the post-WWII era
13.45 Alexander Schmidt (Nashville)
Reflecting the Sonderweg: Ernst Troeltsch, Leo Strauss, and Enlightenment Natural Law in the Age of Democracy
14.30 Gregory S. Brown (Las Vegas/Oxford)
The ›Heavenly City‹ in Post-War America: The ›Liberal Imagination‹ meets the ›Brute Facts of Politics‹. The Context to Peter Gay’s Enlightenment
3.15 Coffee Break
15.45 Ruggero Sciuto (Oxford)
The Venturi Antidote: Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel and the Radical Enlightenment
16.30 Philipp Büttgen (Paris)
Lumières et Aufklärung chez Michel Foucault
17.15 James Schmidt (Boston)
Nihilism, Enlightenment, and the New Failure of Nerve: 1941–1947
The workshops will be conducted as a Zoom meeting. The languages are English and French.
Les workshops se dérouleront sous forme de réunions Zoom. Les langues sont l’anglais et le français.
Die Workshops werden als Zoom-Meetings durchgeführt. Konferenzsprachen sind Englisch und Französisch.
Registration and contact/Enregistrement et contact/Anmeldung und Kontakt:
Mike Rottmann (mike.rottmann@izea.uni-halle.de)