Exploring ‘margins’ in the eighteenth century entails searching the places where the century overflows its bounds, and refuses to be contained or corralled by any monolithic notion. In a book published several decades ago, Georges Benrekassa reopened this question, with a view to re-examining the screen of rationality that veiled the century, a rationality conceived as ‘faith’. For Benrekassa, the margins of the Enlightenment are to be found above all through a process of ideological tunnelling, in order to uncover the spaces eccentric to the age of reason understood as a ‘thought of ordering’ (p. 12). In clarifiying his approach, his effort to avoid the trap of concentricity, he wrote that ‘the question we are faced with is how to break these circles within which the ideology of the Enlightenment contemplates itself’ (p. 13). In effect, Benrekassa's critique belongs to a genealogy that began with the work of Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), a critique of Enlightenment reason as a force of domination, and that was continued by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1977). Foucault lays bare, behind the positivity of the contract and the idealisation of law promoted by the philosophes, a series of disciplinary devices, technologies of coercion. This essay will explore the question of margins in a less ideological fashion by repositioning the literature of the eighteenth century in the context of certain works of history with a sociological dimension. A reversion to concentricity tends to circumscribe the period's major writers, the philosophes.