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Among the justifications for contemporary calls to destroy the legacy of the Enlightenment is the recurrent thesis that it gave rise to neo-liberalism. This article sets out to deconstruct such an accusation by showing it relies less on reading of the texts themselves than on systematically tracking down the ideological positions attributed to the Enlightenment. Conversely, I will follow here a methodology that places literature above philosophy and grounds literary analysis on the sensitivity to the workings of language rather than in whimsical attempts to modernize texts. To this end, the study of the term “nation” and its establishment as a concept in eighteenth-century political texts, most notably those by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, provide a fruitful example. Giving some substance to a word that has been devalued to the point of becoming a mere marker of ideological recognition is beneficial in terms of the history of ideas, by showing how the Enlightenment was able to bring together political options that are today considered to be contradictory. But, at a deeper level, such a study also helps to revitalise the collective imagination, demystifying the neo-liberal idea of the nation as a protective framework for creating businesses. Far from finding itself under attack or on the defensive, the Enlightenment thus regains its ability to shed light on, and debunk, the falsehoods that serve as assumptions underlying the current political discourse.