CES Hoffmann Lecture: How French was the Enlightenment?

Speaker: David A. Bell, Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions & Professor of History, Princeton University

The Enlightenment was once seen as a quintessentially French movement, but several decades of historical work have questioned this characterization. Cases have been made for competing national Enlightenments in the Netherlands and Britain, for colonial Enlightenments, and even for a “Global Enlightenment.” At the third Stanley Hoffmann Annual Lecture on France and the World, David Bell will demonstrate one key feature that the Enlightenment owed to French origins, especially in the milieu of the salons: a style of writing that was deliberately playful and ambiguous that prompted readers to make up their own minds as a form of self-cultivation.

Chair: Mary D. Lewis, Robert Walton Goelet Professor of French History, Harvard University; Resident Faculty & Seminar Co-chair, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University

About

On March 6, 2020 the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) inaugurated the Stanley Hoffmann Annual Lecture on France and the World. This lecture series honors the intellectual legacy of Stanley Hoffmann, who served as Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard University and was a co-founder of CES. Hoffmann, a prominent public intellectual on both sides of the Atlantic, served on the Harvard faculty for nearly 60 years, drawing thousands of students to his celebrated courses.

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Stanley Hoffmann Annual Lecture on France and the World