PROGRES ET VIOLENCE AU XVIIIE SIECLE

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This collection of articles belongs to the vast critical movement which, since the groundbreaking work of Horkheimer and Adorno, has aimed at a reassessment of the reception of the Enlightenment. The authors come from various academic disciplines and different cultural backgrounds, as is the rule for participants to the East-West seminar, in the context of which they originally met in Berlin in 1997. How did thinkers, (enlightened) despots, novelists, poets, historians or theorists imagine, represent or… omit the reality of violence in their visions of progress ? Was there a place for the articulation of violence as a concept in an intellectual paradigm conditioned by the idea of human perfectibility ? Does historical progress necessarily involve violence ? Political imperialism, colonial trade, Jewish emancipation, censure and pamphlets, epic genre or Sadean novels, bullfighting, -sensibility, the history of justice and punishments and, of course, revolution and tradition are the fields which the authors explored together during the seminar. The variety of shades cast by their different perspectives on the antagonistic terms "progress" and "violence" do justice to the concept of the East-West seminar imagined by Robert Darnton.

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