Writing the History of Censorship in the Age of Enlightenment

Abstract

This chapter argues that scholars of eighteenth-century France have much to gain from taking seriously these recent challenges to the liberal conception of the ongoing contest between censorship and free speech. However, the theory of constitutive censorship is employed in this article neither to condemn the shortsightedness of Enlightenment philosophes nor to expose the limitations of their nascent liberal vision. Rather, it is appropriated as a heuristic device to help bring to light the complexity of late-eighteenth-century French thinking about questions of language, liberty, and social control. The relationship between the French philosophes and the absolutist Old Regime state has long been explained in ways that have served the cause of modern liberalism, and modern liberal positions on individual rights and autonomy have frequently been justified by reference to their Enlightenment roots. Students of the French Enlightenment have often worked in tandem with modern defenders of the principle of free speech to provide them with concepts, heroes, enemies, and landmarks.