Besterman Lecture 2025: Antoine Lilti (Collège de France)

13/11/2025, 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

We are delighted to have Antoine Lilti (Collège de France) giving our annual Besterman Lecture.

He will be speaking on ‘The three languages of universalism: thinking globally in the Enlightenment’.

Universalism has become one of the most disputed aspects of the Enlightenment heritage. Some see in eighteenth-century thought a defence against relativism and particularism. Others, however, reproach the Enlightenment for having fostered thinking that is Eurocentric, colonialist, even racist. This lecture adopts a different starting-point. At the heart of the Enlightenment, we find no single theory of universalism but rather competing languages of the universal. There is a cosmopolitan universalism, based on the right of individuals; a progressive universalism, founded on the history of civilisation; and a critical universalism, that denounces the Europeans’ overweening pretentions. It is important to identify these multiple languages of universalism to properly understand the modern relevance of the Enlightenment.

13 November 2025, 5pm, Magdalen College (Grove Auditorium)