At the end of the eighteenth century Immanuel Kant tried to answer the question, what is Enlightenment? He came up with this answer: The Enlightenment was the time during which and the process by which human beings finally emerged from their own self-imposed childhood. The Enlightenment meant shaking off traditional authorities-- kings, priests, fathers—and refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of handed-down ideas. Everything was up for grabs: ideas about politics, religion, sex, the family, and the nation. Both the content of beliefs and the methods by which beliefs were formed came up for scrutiny as writers and thinkers turned their studies away from the supernatural and the metaphysical toward the natural, the physical, and the social. People publicly debated
questions such as: what is freedom of expression? What is, or should be, the relation between religion and the State? What do secularism or freedom of religion really mean? What do we mean when we talk about freedom and equality?

Moreover, Enlightenment was a public process. Reading, thinking, writing,
criticizing was something no one person could accomplish by him or herself. “Dare to know” was the watchword Kant retrospectively assigned to the readers and writers of the Enlightenment.  Recently, this heroic account of the Enlightenment has come under attack.  For Horkheimer and Adorno, the Enlightenment was the origin of the kind of instrumental reason that led to fascism. More recent scholars accuse the Enlightenment of having constructed a “universal man” who is nothing but a camouflage for white, western, male power.  Other critics of the Enlightenment complain that it made our society too secular and too licentious—that it dissolved the basis for morality itself by challenging authority. In this class we will try to decide for ourselves. The Enlightenment was also shaped by the censorship rigorously exercised by the monarchy; we will discuss censorship and the repression of writers. We will revisit many of the classic works of the French eighteenth century, trying to take Kant’s injunction as our watchword as we seek to discover the relation between our own complicated societies and the legacy of the Enlightenment. We will read plays, novels, and philosophical texts.

Readings will include: Voltaire, L’Ingénu; Montesquieu, Les Lettres persanes;
Graffigny, Lettres d’une péruvienne; Rousseau, Les origines et les fondements de l’inégalité, Diderot, Le Supplément au voyage de Bougainville; Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses; Beaumarchais, Le Mariage de Figaro.