Annual Besterman Lecture 2025 - The three languages of universalism: thinking globally in the Enlightenment

The 2025 Besterman Lecture of the Voltaire Foundation 

The three languages of universalism: thinking globally in the Enlightenment

Antoine Lilti (Collège de France)

Universalism has become one of the most disputed aspects of the Enlightenment heritage. Some see in eighteenth-century thought a defence against relativism and particularism. Others, however, reproach the Enlightenment for having fostered thinking that is Eurocentric, colonialist, even racist. This lecture adopts a different starting-point. At the heart of the Enlightenment, we find no single theory of universalism but rather competing languages of the universal. There is a cosmopolitan universalism, based on the right of individuals; a progressive universalism, founded on the history of civilisation; and a critical universalism, that denounces the Europeans’ overweening pretentions. It is important to identify these multiple languages of universalism to properly understand the modern relevance of the Enlightenment.