Between Republicanism and the Enlightenment: Turgot and Adams

Abstract

For about thirty years republicanism has been claiming for itself increasingly broad swaths of the Age of Enlightenment. Thanks to numerous discoveries and reinterpretations of the period, a large number of versions of that period have emerged in which republican tenets have been opposed to, or superimposed on, Enlightenment points of view, or in which these two have been seen as simply moving in the same direction. Actually, it is not particularly easy to compare republicanism and the Enlightenment as historiographical paradigms. This is because the historical object known as republicanism has from the very beginning been proposed as a paradigm in and of itself, while the Enlightenment has rarely been considered one as such. In an attempt to shed some light on this issue, it is possible to contrast the work of two important historians who have both explored these phenomena, namely Franco Venturi and John Pocock.¹