https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=686 This article explores the formative influence of religion on the historical Enlightenment in the Netherlands. The mainstream narratives of Enlightenment and religion do not necessarily have an antagonistic and mutually destructive relationship, where the annihilation of one formative narrative means the survival of the other—as formulated by Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) and Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) in the texts Dialektik der Aufklärung (first published in 1944) and Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft (first published in 1947 under the title Eclipse of Reason), or as subsequently expressed in Jürgen Habermas’s concept of secularization in Glauben und Wissen (first published in 2001). In their thinking, however, the critical theorists mainly engaged with the German, English, and French Enlightenment traditions, leaving the Dutch tradition aside. While they saw the French Enlightenment as distinguished by its claim to universal validity, for example, or by the rigorous rejection of all aspects of religion, this article contends that it is the early appearance and its specific relationship to religion that characterizes the Enlightenment in the Netherlands. The practical relevance of critical theory or its theoretical conceptualization of the Enlightenment need, therefore, to be examined here. It appears that the critical thinkers, in their generalized thesis about the “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, restricted themselves to the German, French and Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment traditions, while unjustifiably disregarding the special Enlightenment tradition in the Netherlands, which was closely intertwined with an attitude of tolerance and humanism. In doing so, they overlooked the fact that Enlightenment can take different forms. Numéros en texte intégral Géographies et imaginaires Savants mélanges fr jeu., 02 oct. 2025 11:24:26 +0200 mer., 03 déc. 2025 10:58:37 +0100 https://www.ouvroir.fr/deshima/index.php?id=686 0