Professor Lorraine Daston delivers the 2019 Besterman Lecture By the late seventeenth century, Western Europe’s metropolises were in competition with each other to straighten, illuminate, sanitize, broaden, and above all order their thoroughfares, granting the police enormous power. After the creation of the office of the Paris Lieutenant de Police in 1667, the Parisian police became the avant garde of the French absolutist bureaucracy, admired and feared throughout Europe. The sheer scope and detail of these regulations is staggering: they represent a heroic effort to anticipate, counter, and regulate every possible affront to public safety and good order. It is within this context that a new kind of rule emerges: the rule so certain of its universality, so confident of its foresight, that its enforcement excludes the possibility of adjustment to particular cases.

Voltaire Foundation

Rule-Mania in Enlightenment Paris

Keith M Baker, professor of Early Modern European History at Stanford University, explains a Digital Humanities project mapping the debates on the constituent articles of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. What happened to rights in 1789? I plan to present in this lecture some results of a collaborative research project exploring this question. Digital Humanities has done remarkable work to reveal the diffusion of texts, the circulation of letters, and the distribution of writers across enlightened Europe. In this regard, its model has tended toward the sociological and dispersive. What might be done, though, with a more political and concentrated approach that would try to digitize decisions and visualize moments of collective choice? What, more specifically, might we learn about the writing of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, that portal to the modern political world? Methods of digital humanities aside, there are also good historiographical reasons for looking again at the week of debates in which the National Assembly fixed on that document. The project I will discuss was provoked most immediately by Jonathan Israel's claims that the principles of the French Revolution, particularly as expressed in August 1789 in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, represented a victory for the group of intellectuals he gathers together under the banner of a Radical Enlightenment deriving its ideas and arguments ultimately from materialist philosophy. But it bears also on issues raised by new histories of human rights, for which the character of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen must be crucial for the question of continuity or rupture in the practice of rights talk.

Writing Rights in 1789

Martin van Gelderen delivers a talk for the Besterman Lecture 2018

Methusela and the unity of mankind: late Renaissance and early Enlightenment conceptions of time

Willard McCarty, King's College, London, gives the 2017 Besterman lecture. If the digital computer is to be a 'machine for doing thinking' in the arts and letters, rather than merely a way of automating tasks we already know how to perform, then its constraints and the powers these constraints define need to be understood. This lecture explores those constraints and powers across the three stages of modelling a research problem: its translation into discrete, binary form; manipulation by the machine; and re-translation into scholarly terms.

Digital Rhetoric, literae humaniores and Leibniz's dream

A highly critical account of Adam Smith's views on famine, which fail to recognize that you can have starvation in the midst of plenty.

Adam Smith, Poverty and Famine

Short podcast looking at Enlightenment philosopher Rousseau's copy of La Lettre à d'Alembert, housed in the Bodleian Library.

Rousseau's copy of La Lettre à d'Alembert

Professor Nathalie Ferrand (École Normale Supérieure Paris) gives the 2012 Besterman Lecture for the Voltaire Foundation. This lecture is in French.

Rousseau: Archive et Invention.

The Voltaire Foundation is a world leader for eighteenth-century scholarship, publishing the definitive edition of the Complete Works of Voltaire (Œuvres complètes de Voltaire), as well as Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (previously SVEC), the foremost series devoted to Enlightenment studies, and the correspondences of several key French thinkers.

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Voltaire Foundation

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