Enlightenment at Court, and Anti-Court Polemics in the Enlightenment

The point of departure for the conference and the book is an apparent paradox:  On the one hand, the royal court and court society are the objects of negative attributions in many Enlightenment writings- the court is portrayed as the site of despotism, effeminization, corruption, etc.  Courtiers appear as effeminized and hedonistic sycophants who are concerned only with their own position, and not at all with the common good.  The court serves in these writings as a negative contrast to the canon of virtues of classical republicanism. On the other hand, it is clear that many authors who used these anti-court stereotypes and invectives were actually involved with networks and patron-client relationships that were connected with the political-social world of the court, or at least with individual members of court.  Many authors who represented themselves as "Enlightened" were quite close to courts in their social relationships, and often they were even part of the social figurations of courts.  Even some rulers, such as Frederick II of Prussia, used anti-court topoi, even though they stood at the head of a royal court.
It is the goal of this conference to examine this entangling of social constellations and discursive practices and thereby to reconsider the relationship between European royal courts and the protagonists of the Enlightenment and their ideas. 
Two basic issues stand in the foreground: 
First, European courts should be considered as Enlightenment "places of encounter."  How and how much were Enlightenment projects and authors tied to royal courts?  Were courts not among the most important institutional and social spaces for Enlightenment practices?  Other institutional and social communicative spaces (such as universities, academies, societies, salons, clubs, Freemason lodges, etc.) can be identified as centers of the Enlightenment in some countries, but not across Europe generally.  Nevertheless, until now research on the Enlightenment has focused on these various institutionalizations of sociability and intellectualism and largely neglected to consider princely courts.
Second, it should be asked why royal courts were so often a focus of criticism, especially for Enlightenment authors, despite courts' important function in the Enlightenment.  Therefore, to understand the social and political function of anti-court discourses in the context of the courts is another important issue for this conference.