This is the Serbian translation of two key texts for understanding the appearance and life of the Republic of Letters, which brought together learned men and writers since at least the fifteenth century, as well as a ‘republic’ whose institutional reality was always precarious. Both Françoise Waquet and Robert Shackleton – in their texts “What is the Republic of Letters?” and “How Did French ‘Philosophes’ Become a Party?” – consider the crucial moment in the transformation of the republic of letters from a loosely connected bookworms exchanging letters and manuscripts into an influential group to be the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Whether this transformation was justified and what are its effects, remains a subject of debate to this day.