On 16 September 2016, Professor Richard BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI, Chairholder of the European Civilization Chair at the Natolin (Warsaw) campus of the College of Europe, delivered a plenary lecture to the III Congress of Scholars of the Eighteenth Century, organized by the Polish Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.
The title of his lecture, Co zmieniło oświecenie? was deliberately ambiguous – it can be translated either as ‘What did the Enlightenment change?’ or as ‘What changed the Enlightenment?’. This served as the point of departure for an argument that the changes brought about by the Enlightenment interacted with the changes effected by the eighteenth-century world on the Enlightenment, as well as with posterity's changing perceptions of the Enlightenment since the end of the eighteenth century.
Having steered a middle course between the extremes of socio-economic determinism and the complete autonomy of ideas, Professor BUTTERWICK-PAWLIKOWSKI concluded with a personal interpretation of the Enlightenment dynamic over the long eighteenth century: a shift from universal questions to particular solutions, from radicalism to moderation and from cosmopolitanism to patriotism.