Abstract

The notions of enthusiasm and fanaticism, besides the fact that they were associated with the concrete phenomenon of religious zeal at the time of the Reformation, were also, throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the object of a literature that built a specific image of the so-called enthusiasts, be they the English Puritans, the Huguenot prophets or the Jansenist convulsionaries. By constructing this image, literature – philosophical, medical or satirical – produced at the same time the specular image of itself, sometimes as pure alterity in relation to the fanatic, sometimes relativizing this opposition. Our journey starts from some of these formulations in England at the beginning of the 17th century, and then pays attention carefully to the elaborations of Swift and Diderot about fanaticism and enthusiasm, from the beginning to the middle of the 18th century, showing that philosophy itself, often understood as the opposite of fanaticism or madness, can also become its other when it gives in to enthusiasm.