Enlightenment Decentred: Networks, Media, Practices

 

The Enlightenment has been increasingly approached as a global phenomenon in recent years, yet most studies still concentrate on particular centres, often in relation to peripheries. Can Enlightenment be reconstructed beyond national and linguistic boundaries – either as a city- or region-focused set of ideas and practices or as a continent- or world-wide network? This question stands at the centre of Enlightenment Decentred, which aims to transcend debates over the national manifestations of Enlightenment. Following the appearance of Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich’s The Enlightenment in National Context (1981), research tended to break down the Enlightenment into various manifestations along geographical lines. The term became so fragmented that the 2000s witnessed clarion calls for the reconstruction of a common core, an Enlightenment above its local and theoretical strands (for example, Jonathan Israel’s tetralogy on Radical Enlightenment (2001-2019) and John Robertson’s The Case for the Enlightenment (2005)). 

Enlightenment Decentred moves beyond the tendency of both ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’ to employ national parameters by focusing on connections and links between groups, institutions or individual agents. The aim is to upscale Enlightenment by extending it to regions, continents or global trends – while at the same time downscaling it by locating Enlightenment in spaces smaller than the modern nation-state, in a period when even the most centralised polities were far from unified or uniform in the modern sense. Each component of the project will examine reciprocal connections between two-three locations regardless of national boundaries (e.g. Kolkata-Bristol-Boston, Berlin-Riga-Königsberg, Uppsala-Göttingen-St Petersburg). The effect is a decentring of Enlightenment and its re-assemblage as a network of mutual exchanges of ideas, practices and media. Particular attention will be dedicated to different media and genres of intellectual dissemination: can Enlightenment be decentred also in relation to the means by which it was propagated?  

A major methodological tenet of Enlightenment Decentred is its rejection of the tendency to conceptualise Enlightenment in terms of centre and peripheries. By highlighting the links between individuals, institutions, and hubs of knowledge production across borders or within a single country, the project recasts Enlightenment as a thick web of exchanges focused on intellectual content and its medial transfer.

An international conference, generously supported by the OUP John Fell Fund, will be held at Oxford in October 2026. Extended versions of the papers will be published in an edited collection.