Was ist Aufklärung? Franco Venturi e il suo lungo corpo a corpo con la storiografia filosofica

Was ist Aufklärung? is not only the well-known question, that Kant provided a response to in 1784; it is also the formula, which according to the Italian historian Franco Venturi (1914-1994) has influenced scholarship and thinking on the Enlightenment as a European phenomenon ever since – in anything but a positive way. As a result of the success of (neo-)Hegelian traditions, indeed, a merely philosophical look at eighteenth-century culture and ideas has become hegemonic at the expense of a more nuanced, pluralistic and ultimately political approach, which Venturi considers to be the prerogative of historians. This article aims to reconstruct Venturi’s juxtaposition of philosophers and historians across his works on the French and Italian Enlightenment, with a view to assessing its lasting relevance in the light of the theoretical, methodological and historiographical changes that have occurred since then, and particularly the rise of the so-called Radical Enlightenment.