The Turin Humanities Programme and Fondazione1563 are pleased to invite postgraduate
students and early career researchers to submit their applications to the Summer School
“Enlightenment legacy: the rights of man in a global perspective”.
The Summer School intends to elucidate, from a global perspective, a fundamental – although
often neglected – aspect of the legacy of the Enlightenment to better understand its enduring
and controversial presence over time in the fields of politics, society, law, and economics. Namely, the Summer School will focus on the political and constitutional language of the rights
of man, seen as the most lasting legacy of the cultural revolution through which the
Enlightenment changed the course of global history, acting as a “laboratory of modernity”.
The Summer School will engage with the Enlightenment’s transformation of the old moral
concept of natural rights into the modern political language of the “rights of man” and the
ambitious Enlightenment project of bringing about the constitutionalization of the rights of man
as part of a modern politics of emancipation that began well ahead of the French Revolution.
Moreover, the Summer School will explore the controversial affirmation and metamorphoses of
the Enlightenment’s culture of the rights of man in a global context throughout the Nineteenth
and Twentieth centuries. By so doing, the Summer School aims at shedding light on the
Enlightenment’s relevance to deal with issues raised by the contemporary evolutions of global
constitutionalism and governance, that still require to be addressed.
The THP Summer School provides a forum for postgraduate students and early career
researchers in the field of humanities and the social sciences (history, philosophy, law,
economics, political science and international relations) to engage with the most up-to-date
academic debates and global historiographical currents on the Enlightenment and its cultural,
political and legal legacy.