ABSTRACT
The Enlightenment is of course an historian’s construction. There were several of them, French, Scottish and German, each complex and heterogeneous. Nonetheless we can identify some major shared themes and projects, each of which claimed and still claims the badge of Enlightenment. There is, first of all, the attempt to define enlightenment by drawing a distinction between the unenlightened and the enlightened, unenlightened them and enlightened us. Here the canonical text was and is Kant’s Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? of 1784. And Kant’s text has of course had its heirs and successors, most recently Foucault’s of 1984, whose title repeats Kant’s Was ist Aufklärung? (‘What is Enlightenment?’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. P.Rabinow, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
