Introduction to the Special Issue ‘Enlightenment and Modernity’

Abstract

These introductory remarks present a brief overview of the question of the Enlightenment’s relationship to modernity. It charts the emergence of a novel sense of historicity connected to eighteenth-century usage of the term ‘enlightened’ and the belated, late twentieth-century attempts to connect this usage to modernity. The three contributions to this special issue are then introduced and the commonalities and divergences between them are highlighted.