Crossing Boundaries. Cosmopolitanism, Secularism and Words in the Age of Revolutions

This study is focused on a cosmopolitan group of both famous and less famous radical intellectuals from both sides of the Atlantic – some of them of popular origin and self-educated – all linked by relations of personal friendship or at least collaboration or contiguity: Thomas Paine, Joel Barlow, Nicolas de Bonneville, John Oswald, Joseph Ritson. The analysis of the language strategies they used to attempt a democratization of the universal communication that had been until then kept among the educated members of the Republic of letters – in particular insofar as the high tradition of the critique of revealed religion was concerned, considered here as an absolutely crucial point – centers on the themes of political etymology and of confidence in the performative energy of decoded words