This chapter examines the complex relationship between philosophy, censorship, and the public sphere in early modern and Enlightenment Europe, focusing on Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties (1798). It engages competing reconstructions of the German Aufklärung—from binary reductions to open-ended analyses of multidimensional antagonisms and positional struggles. Given that Kant’s later polemical texts articulated positions within a prestructured field of cultural production, the chapter adopts an archaeological approach to uncover the earlier conflicts that shaped this field. Taking up Koselleck’s identification of Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) as marking the onset of the Enlightenment, the chapter critically assesses both his pathogenetic model—structured by Schmittian dualism—and Habermas’s base–superstructure account, which reduces philosophy to ideological function. While drawing on Israel’s triangular model of the Early Enlightenment, it departs from his Spinoza-centric emphasis by foregrounding the earlier, institutionally embedded conflicts surrounding Hobbes—his rejection by Boyle, the Cambridge Platonists, Nonconformists, the legal profession, and the universities. It repositions Hobbes and Spinoza as discursively paired Epicurean outcasts, excluded by multiple European thought collectives, especially in the German university context. Fleck’s theory is used to trace the emergence of epistemic positions formed through antagonistic differentiation. The chapter concludes with a Fleckian reading of Kant’s institutional thought style: the philosophy faculty emerges not as a neutral site of reason, but as a mediating organ between state and public—regulating cultural production and constraining the public articulation of thought under censorship.