RICERCA ITALIANA     

The Late Enlightenment and the Crisis of the Old Regime in Europe

Università degli Studi di Torino

Abstract

The project will investigate the final phase of the Enlightenment as a subject in its own right. Encompassing both intellectual developments and their cultural and institutional settings, it will examine ways in which earlier Enlightenment preoccupations were re-assessed and new ones came to the fore. It reflects the conviction that the late Enlightenment should not be subsumed within the origins of the French Revolution. The attention will be concentrated on the debate about the the creation of a new political language, the abolition of feudality, the rights of men, the new patriotic mean, the expansion of the public sphere, the construction of the new civil society and of birth of the public opinion, and the innovations in the economical system to reconcile virtue and wealth, development and equity. The purpose of this project, therefore, is to explore the historical context of the Eighteenth-Century globalisation and the abrupt politicisation of the Enlightenment culture and her peculiarities.

Principal Investigator

Vincenzo Ferrone Università degli Studi di TORINO

Research Objectives

The project will investigate the final phase of the Enlightenment as a subject in its own right in the crisis of European Old Regime. It reflects the conviction that the late Enlightenment should not be subsumed within the origins of the French Revolution. It will examine ways in which earlier Enlightenment preoccupations were re-assessed and new ones came to the fore, as well as the extent to which the Enlightenment's proponents gained institutional recognition within their societies.
The transformations of European colonial empires after the Seven Years’ war, the commercial growth, the new interests toward travel literature, toward the “other” and the extra-European cultures, determinated the need to confirm the national identities in face of the break of the cultural differences. The end of the Seven Years’ war opened the way to the final crisis of the Old Regime, to the reforms enforced by the great national monarchies.
The end of the Seven Years’ war and these challenges to the traditional understanding of the Enlightenment have been particularly strongly felt in study of its later stages, in the 1770s and 1780s, from the age of the political reforms to the age of the revolutions. In these circumstances, the earlier intel1ectual aspects of the Enlightenment were re-assessed in face of the anachronism of feudality, the birth of the rights of men, the new patriotism, the rise of the public opinion, the new social and political function of the r >>>

First Results

The activity of the research project will explaine the re-orienteering of politics in the Lathe Enlightenment as effect of the institutional and social transformations, due to the facing with extra-European cultures and civilizations and to the new rhythms of the intellectual, cultural, commercial and social transformations after the Seven-Year War.
The researches will be finalized with:
1) workshops with Italian and internationals specialists and PhD students.
2) two international congresses, to be carried out in Venice and Vercelli, in 2008 and 2010 with the involvement of Italian and international specialists.
3) a website at the Department of the humanities that will will freely accessible to the international community of scholars worldwide
4) Three collections of essays about the researches.
5) The publication of other essays and books by the members of the Research unities within the general project.

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

Enlightenment is nowadays at the centre of political debate in the current context of the crisis of secularization and costitutes a phenomenon studied, by many European and American scholars, in the search of European identity. Moving in this direction, the scientific starting point is represented first by the work carried out for a long time by the coordinator with collaboration of people who will take part into this project. The research started with the book “I profeti dell'Illuminismo. Metamorfosi della ragione nel tardo Settecento italiano” (1989; II revised ed. 2000) and continued with the book "L'illuminismo. Dizionario storico" edited by the coordinator and Daniel Roche (Roma-Bari, Laterza, 1997), which was edited three times in Italian, translated once into Spanish (“Diccionario Historico de la Ilustración”, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1998), once into French (“Le Monde des Lumières”, Paris, Fayard, 1999), and once into Russian (Moskva, Pamiatniki Historiceskoy Mysli, 2003). The research continued with the two previous research programs of national interest financed in the years 2000 and 2005, entitled “The Culture of the European Enlightenment” and “The Enlightenment and the human rights in the crisis of the Old Regime”, both directed by the same coordinator of this project and to wich partecipated many members of these four research teams. In particular we would like to remember some results of these activities, as the critical edition of >>>