This paper reviews Simon Pietro Calisti's 2025 book on Voltaire's Anti-Pascal and its eighteenth-century reception. Calisti treats the Anti-Pascal not as scattered marginalia on Pascal's Pens & eacute;es but as the polemical core of a long conflict on the nature of "modernity": a Voltairian, empiricist and anti-Cartesian naturalisation of the human condition, versus a "Christian modernity" defended by theologians and apologetes who mobilise Cartesian and Malebranchian arguments to reconcile reason and faith. The article highlights Calisti's analysis of the three waves of Voltaire's Remarques (1734, 1742 and 1778), the central themes of the quarrel (anthropology, Scripture, deism, Deus absconditus), and the decisive role of the Port-Royal editorial tradition, whose partial cartesianisation of Pascal offers rationalist aguments in favour of the Christian faith. The article then questions the contemporary relevance Calisti assigns to Voltaire's opponents. Stressing Pascal's own anti-Cartesian, Gassendist epistemology and the crisis of figurist exegesis after Spinoza and Richard Simon, it argues that eighteenth-century apologetes defend Pascal by abandoning Pascal-either sliding toward deism via metaphysical proofs, toward obscurantist mystery, or toward problematic theological guarantees of certainty. A final regret is Calisti's omission of Pierre Bayle, whose analyses sharpen the apologetic dilemma and complicate any appeal to "Christian Enlightenment".
The text examines the transformation of the Robinsonade from its founding myth in Robinson Crusoe to contemporary "dark Robinsonades". While nineteenth-century narratives promoted rational mastery of nature, survival, and colonial ideology, modern fictions dismantle this imaginary. In a fully known and hostile world, the island is no longer a utopian space but a site of violence, failure, and regression. Contemporary survival stories emphasize the collapse of adaptation, social bonds, and moral frameworks under conditions of scarcity and fear. The island becomes a generalized metaphor for any constraining environment, exposing human vulnerability when confronted with an indifferent or catastrophic world.
The Crater (1847) by James Fenimore Cooper is a political and moral work that combines Robinsonade, utopia, and dystopia. Set against the backdrop of American territorial expansion, the novel follows Mark Woolston, shipwrecked on a barren reef that he makes fertile through labor and scientific knowledge, a metaphor for the conquest of the American frontier. He later establishes an ideal, hierarchical, and conservative society based on property and moral order. However, the influx of settlers, demagoguery, and the corruption of religion, law, and the press lead to the collapse of the utopia, ultimately destroyed by a natural cataclysm, illustrating a pessimistic and cyclical vision of history. In this article, we will seek to show how the successive transitions from Robinson Crusoe to utopia, then from utopia to dystopia, shed light on the political interpretation of Cooper's work.
This dossier analyzes robinsonades from Defoe to the present day as a literary, ideological, and media device. After establishing a fiction focused on the individual, the economy, and colonization, the genre was turned on its head by dark robinsonades, then reconfigured through intermediality, which renewed its forms and critical issues.
This article examines the enduring fascination with desert islands and the Robinsonade myth from an intermedial perspective. The island, both an imaginary space, an experimental setting, and a symbol of isolation, has crossed centuries and media since Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. The author analyzes various forms of representation: early maps, poetic atlases blending fact and fiction, historical narratives about real islands, comics (Phil & eacute;mon), and digital devices like the screen saver Johnny Castaway. These examples show how the island gradually becomes a simplified visual formula while retaining strong evocative power. Robinson thus becomes less a character than a narrative principle, constantly adapted and reinterpreted in different cultural and media contexts. The Robinsonade emerges as a fundamental form of fiction, revealing modern imaginaries and their circulation between media.
This text examines the Robinsonade in the eighteenth century through Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, connecting it to Enlightenment debates in philosophy, science, and ideology. Paolo Quintili shows that the early novel emerges at a moment when the boundary between fact and fiction is deeply unstable, both in literature and experimental science, as illustrated by the parallel positions of Defoe and Newton concerning the rejection of feigned hypotheses. The Robinsonade thus presents itself as a fiction claiming moral and cognitive truth and also functions as a thought experiment about the state of nature, social isolation, and individual formation, particularly in Rousseau. At the same time, it conveys a bourgeois ideology, which legitimizes individual labor, property, colonization, and slavery, especially through the relationship between Robinson and Friday. The text highlights the fundamental ambiguity of the Robinsonade, oscillating between moral critique and ideological justification.
In this paper, we examine the initial reception of Gramsci's Prison Notebooks in Italy at the turn of the 1950s, focusing in particular on the case of Ernesto De Martino. Studying this reception allows us to identify the real issues at stake, at the intersection of social philosophy and the philosophy of history. Our argument is based on several Gramscian concepts such as: subaltern social groups, past traditions, and active modes of survival in religious folklore. Through the transformations initiated by De Martino, we show how these concepts are articulated and gradually converge around the following question: under what conditions can the past become revolutionary? We thus develop a new conception of the margins of history in Notebook 25, where the dehumanisation and naturalisation of the subalterns go hand in hand. Far from reducing the subalterns to silence, this very radical conception of the history of oppression calls for a positive study of past religious and folkloric traditions, considered as the embodied archives of a denied history. The awakening and mobilisation of the past will then make it possible to move beyond a purely event-based conception of revolutionary rupture.
In reflecting on the distinctions between good sense, common sense, and folklore, Gramsci rejects, in his Prison Notebooks, the Fascist regime's attempt to use folklore as a backward-looking means to idealise the people. At the same time, Gramsci criticises certain Romantic literature for its distorted portrayal of popular life. Just as good sense represents the "healthy core" of common sense-that is, popular ways of acting, feeling, and thinking-might folklore be understood as the unhealthy core of common sense? This redefinition reopens the question of the union between town and country, a key issue for any revolutionary strategy.
Although the phrase 'enlightened despot' was already in use in the 18th century, the conceptualisation of enlightened despotism as a kind of political model during the Enlightenment only appeared in the mid-19th century. The long history of this idea, rooted in political theory and shaped by various historical configurations in Europe, encourages us to revisit the appropriations and transformations that justified it and allowed it to spread. From Montesquieu to Catherine II, from L'Esprit des lois to the Nakaz, which repeatedly references it, the entire question of the influence of Enlightenment ideas on politics is raised, and this issue is explored in the present dossier by examining how 'enlightened' power was conceived of in the 18th century.
Georg Forster, a German traveller, naturalist and revolutionary, offers an original perspective on the role of the enlightened sovereign in improving the living conditions of European societies. At first, he believed in the benefits of an enlightened monarch's actions, who should spread the Enlightenment among his subjects. However, Forster's empirical observations, followed by his considerations on the science of man, gradually led him to question this beneficial character. His political reflections are part of a broader reflection on morality and anthropology. As a traveller and author of travel literature, Forster observed human living conditions empirically and wondered how people could better themselves and achieve their moral goals. Man is shaped by his natural and social environment, and Forster was initially convinced that the sovereign could play an essential role in transforming this environment, thereby improving Man. Yet he witnessed the failure of reform efforts by enlightened monarchs, notably Joseph II, at the beginning of the French Revolution. Other sovereigns perverted the natural and social environment of their subjects to such an extent that individual improvement became impossible. These disillusionments led Forster to take a political stance against sovereigns.
In explaining mental disorders and their genesis, psychoanalysis very early turned its back on taking into account social factors and, more generally, factors other than psychological ones. However, if we reread the early works of Jacques Lacan, in particular his theory of family complexes, we observe an awareness of the way in which the social environment is brought to shape subjectivity. The article therefore proposes to revisit Lacan's work, in particular his works from the "prestructuralist" period, with a triple objective: to explain how psychoanalysis could have significantly broadened our understanding of mental disorders by uncovering diverse and varied factors that, by hypothesis, may be brought to play a role in the genesis of these same disorders; to take the measure of psychoanalysis' withdrawal into itself and its ignorance of the way in which the social acts on subjects; to show, finally, that Lacan's work, under certain conditions, offers keys to understanding the way in which subjectivity results from a shaping of the subject over the course of his socialization and the vagaries of his existence.
The art of reigning is defined by Montesquieu as follows: the prince must be a prince, lead by example, and, above all, not infringe the laws that define monarchy by preserving the freedom of his subjects. He developed this theme in several opuscules, never published during his lifetime: caract & egrave;re de quelques princes, probably from the same period). Both analyse the weaknesses of 'political' princes, emulators of Machiavellianism. But above all, a 'treatise on the prince', rejected from other works and copied in 1748-1750 in the Pens & eacute;es, sets out the principles of this 'art': it begins with the obedience that subjects owe to the prince, but it places greater emphasis on the duties of the prince and the moderation he must uphold, and even love.
As the idea of a philosophical era developed over the course of the eighteenth century, many believed that, given the presumed example of various 'enlightened' princes, a monarch, inspired by advisors imbued with the new sciences, would be the one to lead their subjects towards a necessarily better future. Around 1770, through a sort of virtual dialogue between Grimm, Holbach, Frederick II, and Diderot, this hope began to fade, with the monarch becoming more of an obstacle, and confidence in that vision collapsing. Some envisioned a new idea where enlightenment would come not from on high but from below: the task henceforth would be to enlighten not the king but the people. The wager was on an enlightened people overcoming the resistance of the governors and, in the long term, leading the future world. This vision was categorically refuted by Frederick himself, denouncing any attempt to enlighten the people and even rejecting that ambition as antithetical to the responsibilities of a sovereign.
The article examines the contestation of absolute power in the political articles written Diderot and his collaborators in the Encyclop & eacute;die. The analysis reveals that the critique of absolute power, although coded and subtle in the early volumes to avoid censorship, remains consistent and coherent. This contestation manifests through several strategies: the denial of the divine origin of monarchy, the demonstration of the risks of absolute rule, a morally oriented reuse natural law theory, and a second-degree reading of Hobbesian principles. The study refers to key articles such as 'Autorit & eacute; politique' and '*Droit naturel', as well as texts whose attribution Diderot is now disputed ('Politique', 'Souverains'), and Damilaville's article 'Vingti & egrave;me'. This analysis allows us to reconsider the concept of 'radicalisation' in Diderot's political thought and highlights the coherence of his critique of absolute power.
The conversations between Diderot and Catherine II of Russia are often viewed as a dialogue between two persons who embody two contrasting or at least parallel worlds: the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the pragmatism of the Russian autocrat. A study of the questions formulated by Diderot in his famous questionnaire addressed to Catherine II during his stay in Saint Petersburg, and of the empress's answers to the philosopher, allows us to avoid a simplistic interpretation and shows the extent to which the ideas and political practices of the Enlightenment were interconnected.
The public good represented a major concept in the legislative vocabulary of Catherine II, second only to the concepts of Motherland and patriotism, with which it was closely related. The Empress made significant contributions to implementing this concept in Russian political discourse, as evidenced by the preambles of the laws underpinning her administrative, economic, and educational reforms. However, in her interpretation, the public good was systematically equated with her personal interest and was easily confused with the reason of state. It is clear that Catherine II, who posed as a disciple of Montesquieu, did not fully embrace the approach suggested by the author of L'Esprit des lois, who regarded the public good as a political virtue and a collective responsibility of citizens. Instead, she remained in the old paradigm of public good understood as the duty of the prince, as a benefit that the sovereign offers to his subjects.
Taking as its starting point the texts written by Voltaire to justify the policies of Catherine II in the 1760s, the article examines how Voltaire viewed the policies of sovereigns whom modern historiography describes as 'enlightened despots', even though Voltaire is considered to be one of the thinkers who originated this paradoxical concept. The study shows that Voltaire's assessments of sovereigns are largely dependent on pragmatic and relative considerations and guided by a clear rejection of Montesquieu's theory of despotism in The Spirit of the Laws.
