The Enlightenment had its own internet: The Republic of Letters

Big Think Home

Membership

Open search

Open main menu

My account

* My Classes * My Account

* My List * BT+ for my Business

* Early Releases * Sign Out

Membership

Latest
Topics

Back

Philosophy

* Ethics * Religion * Flourishing * Knowledge * Philosophy of Science * Philosophy of Art * Language * Political Theory * Identity * Meaning & Purpose

Science & Tech

* Physics * Biology * Aerospace * Health * Geology * Computing * Engineering * Energy * Biotechnology * Astronomy

Mind & Behavior

* Psychology * Neuroscience * Decision-Making * Mental Health * Consciousness * Emotional Intelligence * Personality * Relationships * Parenting

Business

* Entrepreneurship * Leadership * Finance * Marketing * Innovation * Strategy * Management * Artificial Intelligence * Startups * Economics

History & Society

* History * Literature * Art * Music * Film * Progress * Culture * Sociology * Policy * Geopolitics

Videos

Back

See all videos

Objective reality only exists because other people do

An older man with gray hair sits on a chair in front of a white backdrop, wearing a dark blazer, gray pants, and black shoes, with a purple gradient background behind him.

The psychology of perversion, revenge, and AI companionship

A man sits on a chair against a white backdrop, gesturing with one hand. The background is yellow with abstract black lines and nodes connecting around him.

Physics doesn’t explain the universe. Computation does.

A man sits on a chair in front of a white backdrop, with a dinosaur fossil embedded in soil visible behind the backdrop.

The full story of the dinosaurs, from extinction to extinction

A woman in a red sweater and jeans sits on a chair in a photo studio with a white backdrop, plants, and props visible in the background.

The myth of genius, and who it intentionally leaves out

Two men are shown in separate frames on either side of an illustration of the Tower of Babel; one man wears a jacket and shirt, the other a cap and light jacket, both facing forward.

The myth of a shared reality

An older woman with long gray hair gestures with her hands while speaking. She is wearing a dark jacket with pink cuffs and a black top, set against a plain light background.

Mary Beard: Why no film has ever cracked The Odyssey

Cross-section of an ammonite fossil displaying spiral chambers and mineralized brown and yellow patterns, shown on a black background.

The universe can’t be predicted, even if you know all its rules

Columns

Classes

Back

See all classes

A woman with long hair and glasses wearing a blazer, posed with her hand under her chin, looks at the camera. The photo is overlaid with a semi-transparent colored square.

Members 12 videos Radical Respect at Work Kim Scott Co-Founder, Radical Candor, and Author, Radical Respect: How to Work Together Better

A stylized collage featuring a woman's face, abstract patterns, and a winding arrow in green, red, and black on a divided background.

Members 7 videos How to Rewire Your Brain for Learning Barbara Oakley Professor of engineering

A man with short black hair, wearing a dark collared shirt, smiling at the camera against a plain light background.

Members 10 videos How to Outsmart Misinformation Alex Edmans Professor of Finance, London Business School, and Author, May Contain Lies

A person with long, braided hair is smiling. The portrait has a halftone effect with a beige background and a light blue overlay at the top and bottom.

Members 7 videos Fostering Mutual Understanding Valerie Purdie (Vaughns) Greenaway, PhD Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at Columbia University

An older man with gray hair, glasses, and a beard gestures towards himself, standing in front of a background featuring a black and white anatomical diagram.

Members 7 videos Understanding Trauma Bessel van der Kolk Psychiatrist and neuroscientist

Elderly man with a beard and mustache wearing a collared shirt and sweater, shown in a portrait with a pastel gradient overlay.

Members 10 videos Sustaining Excellence with Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goleman Psychologist and Author, Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day

Store
My Account

Back

* My Classes * My Account

* My List * BT+ for my Business

* Early Releases * Sign Out

Back

* Newsletters * Special Issues * Events

* Big Think+ Learning * Creative Studio * Advertise with Us

* About * Careers * View our Twitter (X) feed View our Youtube channel View our Instagram feed View our Substack feed View our Spotify feed

Sign In
Membership

View our Twitter (X) feed View our Youtube channel View our Instagram feed View our Substack feed View our Spotify feed

What are you curious about?

15,000 letters

The clue is in the name: letters tied this self-proclaimed, transnational society together. Lots of letters. What this “metaphysical republic” lacked in speed, it made up for in volume. Take Leibniz and Voltaire, for example. In their lifetimes, these great minds wrote close to 15,000 letters each, sending them to hundreds of correspondents across all of Europe.

Ignatius Loyola managed only 9,000 letters, but the founder of the Jesuit order cast his intellectual net much wider. While Leibniz and Voltaire largely limited their correspondence to Europe, Loyola had pen pals from Mexico to Macau, thanks to a global network of Catholic missionaries and other like-minded co-religionists.

An oil painting of an elderly man wearing a red jacket and blue hat, writing diligently in a book with a quill pen, next to a window.

Voltaire penning one of his 15,000 letters, wearing what must be his writing cap. (Credit: Art Images via Getty Images)

Voltaire (1694-1778) in his Study (oil on canvas) (Photo by Art Images via Getty Images)

This network linking thousands of scientific and philosophical letter writers had a universal protocol: Experiment — not authority — should be the basis for factual knowledge. The network not only spread this ideal but also its fruits: Biological, geological, and astronomical observations from all around the world made their way back to the studies of Europe’s most learned men (and the occasional woman), and eventually into their pamphlets and books.

Of course, all that is now past. Not the experimental method — at least, not yet — but the hand-written letter is as good as dead, killed by almost two centuries of innovations in communication, from social media all the way back to the telegraph.

Sifting through the remains

As one door closes, another opens. Our digital paradigm offers fresh methods of sifting through the remains of the Republic of Letters. With increasing amounts of centuries-old sources digitized, it becomes easier to do quantitative analyses, and to “scrape, mine, curate, analyze, and visualize data.”

That quote is from an article in the AHR Forum about Mapping the Republic of Letters, a collaborative project based at Stanford University that builds case studies based on the metadata of the Republic’s letters. Among the project’s various results are some fascinating maps, some with new insights into the development of the intellectual climate in Enlightenment Europe and beyond.

Network diagram of philosophers and scientists with robert boyle as a central node, connected by lines representing relationships and influence, labeled with various names.

There was not one Republic of Letters, but many smaller intellectual fiefdoms hiding within the larger whole. (Credit: Mapping the Republic of Letters/Stanford University)

Many of those insights provide a more nuanced picture of the Republic of Letters than we had before. For example, the graph above shows that the Republic of Letters could be better described as a collection of small intellectual fiefdoms rather than as one large whole.

The graph maps the correspondence network of the English philosopher John Locke. It shows just how disconnected the various social and national subgroups in his network were from each other.

A multitude of communities

Rather than everyone writing to everyone, this visual representation clearly shows that several letter writers were the center of their own little epistolary universe, sending and receiving most of their letters to and from a small part of Locke’s total group of correspondents. (Awnsham Churchill, Robert Boyle, Philippus van Limborch — we’re looking at you!)

By demonstrating that there was “a multitude of communities within, or rather underneath, the surface of the Republic of Letters,” this graph offers a valuable corrective to the history of information. Rather than a network, the Republic of Letters was more like a patchwork.

While Enlightenment thinkers liked to style themselves “men of the world,” a meta analysis of their correspondence also calls into question the global nature of the Republic of Letters. Case in point: Benjamin Franklin, arguably the most famous North American of the 18th century, and certainly among the most traveled and best connected.

World map highlighting major flight routes and connections centered on europe and asia, with dense network lines and hub points.

Most of the letters sent and received by Ben Franklin, the most famous North American of the 18th century, revolved on the London-Philadelphia axis. (Credit: Mapping the Republic of Letters/Stanford University)

Yet, despite having spent nearly 20 years in London and traveling on the continent, “Franklin’s correspondents were overwhelmingly found at either end of the London-Philadelphia axis,” as this graph demonstrates. Some small forays aside, Franklin’s correspondence doesn’t venture deep into the continent. To be fair, though, the map also clearly shows that Paris was as important a destination for Franklin’s letters as London.

From massive popularity to relative obscurity

It is somewhat ironic that Voltaire, who has been called “the most alive of dead white males,” is remembered these days mainly for a quote misattributed to him. No, he did not say, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” (not even in French). The phrase is from a Voltaire biography published in 1906 and was meant to be a summary of his attitude, not a direct quote.

This map highlights the places where Voltaire’s works were published between 1712 and 1800, illustrating his significant popularity during that time, in stark contrast to his relative obscurity today. The total number of publications of Voltaire’s work stands at 1,973, of which 1,370 mention a place of publication. Most of those locations are accurate, but for whatever reason — perhaps to evade censorship — 162 are false…and 10 are made-up “fantasy places.”

Map showing various sized orange circles over europe, indicating locations related to "actual places," "stated places," "true stated places," and "false stated places.

This map shows the ‘true’ places of publication for Voltaire’s work. The main ones are Paris (333), Amsterdam (169), and Geneva (157), with London (130) not far behind. But Voltaire was popular across the whole of Europe, and was printed as far away as Lisbon (9 publications), Istanbul (5) and Stockholm (4). (Credit: Mapping the Republic of Letters/Stanford University)

This map shows the true places. The main ones are Paris (333), Amsterdam (169), and Geneva (157), with London (130) not far behind. But Voltaire’s work was popular across the continent, and was printed as far away as Lisbon (9 publications), Istanbul (5) and Stockholm (4). In the Republic of Voltaire’s Letters, London is just an insignificant country town. (Credit: Mapping the Republic of Letters/Stanford University)

Above is another Voltaire-inspired map, this time showing the locations of his correspondents. Paris and Geneva — and to a lesser extent, Berlin, Brussels, and Amsterdam — feature heavily. What’s striking is the near-total absence of addresses in Britain. It’s even more striking when you consider the canonical story of the spread of Enlightenment ideas: from England via Voltaire to the Continent.

Page not found

As this map shows, the absence of correspondence to and from England points to a different story. The mapmakers suggest that Voltaire’s fascination was not with the England of his day but with the reign of Charles II, who had close ties to the court of Louis XIV at Versailles.

Map showing global connectivity with numerous red lines and dots indicating network or travel routes centered on europe.

In the Republic of Voltaire’s Letters, London is just an insignificant country town. ((Credit: Mapping the Republic of Letters/Stanford University)

In the Republic of Voltaire’s Letters, London is just an insignificant country town. (Credit: Mapping the Republic of Letters/Stanford University)

Stanford’s project offers tantalizing summaries of other interesting maps and visualizations from the Republic of Letters, but the project’s web page has the distinct look and feel of something that was last updated 10 years ago. Click on something and you’re likely to see “page not found,” or “Adobe Flash player is no longer supported.” Leibniz never had this problem. Perhaps there’s another lesson here for the meta-Enlightenment.

For more on this, check out the full article about Historical Research in a Digital Age: Reflections from the Mapping the Republic of Letters Project, in the American Historical Review.

For the Mapping the Republic of Letters Project itself, what’s left of it, check its page at Stanford University.

Strange Maps #1241

Got a strange map? Let me know at [\[email protected\]](https://bigthink.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#a0d3d4d2c1cec7c5cdc1d0d3e0c7cdc1c9cc8ec3cfcd).

Follow Strange Maps on X and Facebook

Science and Tech Philosophy Communication History Digital Culture

Frank Jacobs

Frank Jacobs has been writing about strange maps since 2006, published a book on the subject in 2009, and joined Big Think in 2010.

Full Profile