Thinking Europe in the Age of Enlightenment. Philosophes and Antiphilosophes between Universalism and Fragmentation

This essay addresses how Europe was represented in the Age of Enlightenment, focusing on the Mediterranean area (France, Italy and Spain), with the aim to analyse both the controversial relationship between the culture of Enlightenment and the invention of Europe, and the discourse about Europe that arose in the framework of the so-called Counter-Enlightenment, largely neglected by historians so far. It takes a critical approach to ‘postcolonial’ studies which, in viewing the Enlightenment as the source of Eurocentrism as a colonially oriented model of the world, end up presenting artificial and a-historical images of European identity. Did philosophes really think of Europe as a compact world, or did they not rather consider the history of Europe as part of a larger, universal history? I would argue that they identified internal boundaries dividing countries with freedom of thought and expression (generally Protestant Europe) from countries with “heat and Inquisition” (Catholic Europe). As for the Counter-Enlightenment, did its representatives exhibit common anti-European leanings?