The Legacy of the Enlightenment. Rights, Constitutions, Equality
Vincenzo Ferrone, Valentina Altopiedi, and Giuseppe Grieco (Eds.)
Series: Quaderni del Turin Humanities Programme, vol. I
Publisher: Casa Editrice Leo S. Olschki (Firenze) Fondazione 1563 per l’Arte e la Cultura (Torino)
Year: 2025
Pages: 268 pp.
Printed version ISBN: 978 88 222 6974 4
Digital PDF ISBN: 978 88 222 8660 4
DOI: 10.82026/9788822286604
Recent historiography often portrays the Enlightenment as the intellectual source of modern evils and projects contemporary biases on Enlightenment thinkers. Discussions on the legacy of the Enlightenment have ended up being subsumed within the study and exploration of Western imperialism, colonial domination, capitalism, inequalities, and racism. For its part, this volume aims to offer an alternative perspective on the legacy of the Enlightenment. It does so by shedding light on the new language of rights, constitutionalism, and equality shaped by the Enlightenment and by exploring its legacies, transformations, and reinterpretations in the nineteenth century. The Enlightenment promoted a cultural revolution and a new humanism associated with the invention of the language of the “rights of man” and the idea of the equality of humanity. The essays collected in this volume retrace some aspects of the intellectual legacy of this revolution by looking at how Enlightenment authors and texts inf luenced debates on the safeguarding of individual rights, written constitutionalism, inequalities and the remnants of feudalism, ideas of development, the equality of men and women, European colonialism, and the oppression of indigenous people. The volume also explores the impact of the ideas of rights and humanity brought on by the Enlightenment by looking at the new ethical and social role acquired by art and music.
PRESENTATION OF THE TURIN HUMANITIES PROGRAMME
Vincenzo Ferrone and Piero Gastaldo, The Turin Humanities Programme
Vincenzo Ferrone, The Legacy of the Enlightenment: a New Historiographical Paradigm for Our Times
NEW RESEARCH
Valentina Altopiedi, «Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights». Olympe de Gouges, Thinker of the Late Enlightenment
Guglielmo Gabbiadini, Wilhelm von Humboldt «under the Tree of Gernika». Constitutional Discourse, Literary Anthropology and Enlightenment Legacy in the Time of the Consulate
Veronica Granata, Do Books Make Revolutions? Political Uses of Eighteenth-century Philosophical Literature in Restoration France
Giuseppe Grieco, After 1799: Rights, Liberalism, and the Legacy of the Neapolitan Enlightenment
Alessandro Maurini, A Pyrrhic Victory and Definitive Defeat: From Slavery to Race, or the Lost Legacy of the Enlightenment
Sophus A. Reinert and Robert Fredona, The Historical Canon of Political Economy between Reason of State and Enlightenment
Antonio Trampus, Enlightened Constitutionalism: The Rise and Fall of its Political Vocabulary from the late Enlightenment to the Napoleonic Era
ENLIGHTENMENT LECTURES
Lynn Hunt, Writing the History of Human Rights: Some Personal Reflections
Céline Spector, What is Left of the Enlightenment? The Postcolonial Critique of Human Rights
Dan Edelstein, A Hidden Legacy: Enlightenment Rights Talk, Nineteenth-century Constitutions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Giovanni Bietti, Music of Light. How the Great Musicians Helped to Shape and Represent the Enlightenment
Vincenzo Ferrone, The Legacy of the Enlightenment: the Rights of the Individual and the Rights of the Community
New Voices on the Enlightenment and the Rights of Man
Gabriel Darriulat, The Constitutionalisation of the Rights of Man in the Political Theory of Condorcet
Luis De la Peña, Giving the Life for the Rights. Antonio Nariño, the Translation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Fight for the Independence of Colombia
Camilla Froio, ‘The Otherness’: a Comparative Discourse on Volney’s Voyage and Alberto Pasini’s Memories of the Orient
Jesper Lundsby Skov, The Origins of Civil Liberty and Civil Rights in Denmark-Norway in the Late Enlightenment
Vanessa Massuchetto, Women and Enlightenment Thought in the Iberian-American Criminal Legal Order (Eighteenth Century)
Ownership, Slavery, Rights, Reason. Seven Virtual Galleries (Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries), Design, captions, and texts by Gerardo Tocchini
Bibliography
Authors
Image credits
Index of names
Scientific Committee:
Jill Burke, University of Edinburgh
Nicholas Cronk, University of Oxford
Elisabeth Décultot, Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg
Serena Ferente, University of Amsterdam
Vincenzo Ferrone, University of Turin
Nino Luraghi, University of Oxford
Sophus Reinert, Harvard Business School
Editorial Coordination: Elisabetta Ballaira, Fondazione 1563
Program Officer: Virginia Ciccone, Fondazione 1563
The volume adopted the double blind peer review referencing system
The essays by Vincenzo Ferrone, Gerardo Tocchini and Antonio Trampus have been translated from the Italian by Martin McLaughlin and Elisabetta Tarantino
Proofreading by Rachel McHale
