Introduction [in English]

The annual conference of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS) in 2022, at which the essays published here were initially presented, was a memorable occasion for the Society and its members. For most of the delegates attending, CSECS 2022 was the first in-person academic event since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing long months of physical distancing. As organizers, we, together with our program committee, sought to mark this return in a fitting manner by offering a conference theme designed to bring people together: a focus that would permit a re-evaluation of the social, political, and scientific experiences/experiments that we had just been through and that responded to our deeply felt need to reconnect with the experience of the world from which we had been cut off. The theme of the conference, “Experiencing Modernity; Modernity of Experimentation,” invited an examination of the ways in which the Age of Enlightenment defined itself as “modern,” with a particular emphasis on modernity as a new way of experiencing the world. The aim of the conference was to reflect on the usefulness of the concept of experience in defining what was at stake in the period’s self-designation as a time of modernity. Modern experience was defined by a growing sense of historical distance from the past (the past as a “foreign country”), and it became the object of a drive to record human experience—in dictionaries and encyclopaedias, for example—or of measurement through experimentation. The conference theme plays on the words “experience” and “experiment.” Historically, these two words are closely related: in French, experience is almost the equivalent of experimentation, while in English one of the earliest recorded meanings of the word experience designated the action of submitting something to a test (“action of putting to the test, experimentation”). An experience is also an observation of facts or events, and in more recent usage it signifies that which a person discovers, encounters, undergoes, and feels subjectively. This latter signification is the predominant meaning of the term in English today. Accounts of modernity in the twentieth century have sometimes emphasized the Enlightenment’s embrace of reason (rather than faith, for example) as the basis for understanding the world, and they have criticized this valorization of reason as culturally Eurocentric, tending to reinforce masculine and heteronormative dominance. At other times, accounts of Enlightenment modernity have foregrounded “sensibility” as a defining characteristic, placing emphasis on individuals—their desires, dreams, and passions—thereby emphasizing the development of an individualism that, along with liberalism, led to an abandonment of traditions and collective institutions. These two types of narrative, albeit in different ways, share the idea that the eighteenth century was a turning point in the modern world’s emergence from what is now known as the ancien régime. Current research, however, tends to show that this way of looking at the eighteenth century may well be somewhat outdated. An expansion of areas and subjects of research, often combining several academic disciplines, together with the introduction of new perspectives in gender, indigenous, and postcolonial studies, have brought to the fore an array of documents and new sources of evidence that have transformed our understanding of eighteenth-century modernity. The idea of experience seemed to us a key concept to help account for this transformation; it provides a useful means of drawing together the diversity of research perspectives available to our colleagues in eighteenth-century studies. The concept highlights the importance in the period of the experimental philosophy that underpinned the new science, and experimentation was the spirit behind a range of initiatives in nascent areas of public policy (such as experiments in …