Per una storia degli effetti: Illuminismo

Untangling the very tight bond that binds the Enlightenment to its own legend, to its own mythology, is a difficult undertaking. In a sense, it means recovering the Kantian question in all its force (“What is Enlightenment?”) and applying it not merely to something that has been (that is, to a well-defined historical period), but rather to a spirit, a posture of thought, or a project with temporal and historical-cultural boundaries that are decidedly broader. In this sense, the Enlightenment is not merely an episode in the history of human thought, but an attitude that can be found across different epochs and cultures, even though it found its fullest expression in eighteenth-century Europe.