What was the Enlightenment?
The Enlightenment (c. 1685–1815) was an intellectual movement emphasizing reason, individual rights, and progress. Thinkers like Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau challenged traditional authority — monarchy, aristocracy, and church — and developed ideas about natural rights, separation of powers, and the social contract that inspired the American and French Revolutions.
The Enlightenment — also called the Age of Reason — was the intellectual movement that reshaped European and Atlantic world thought in the 17th and 18th centuries. Building on the Scientific Revolution's demonstration that reason could unlock nature's secrets, Enlightenment thinkers applied the same rational, empirical approach to human society, government, religion, and morality.
John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689) was foundational. He argued that humans possessed natural rights to life, liberty, and property, and that governments derived their legitimacy from the consent of the governed — not from divine right. If a government violated these rights, the people had the right to revolution. Montesquieu advocated separation of powers. Voltaire championed religious tolerance and freedom of expression. Rousseau explored the social contract and popular sovereignty. Adam Smith applied rational analysis to economics.
The Enlightenment was not a single, unified movement. French philosophes like Diderot compiled the Encyclopédie to systematize all human knowledge. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like Hume and Smith focused on empiricism and political economy. German Aufklärung, led by Kant, emphasized critical reason. The movement included both radical atheists and devout Christians who believed reason was God's gift to humanity.
The political impact was revolutionary — literally. Enlightenment ideas directly inspired the American Declaration of Independence ('life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' echoes Locke), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and revolutionary movements from Haiti to Latin America. These ideas also carried contradictions that would take centuries to resolve — Enlightenment thinkers who wrote eloquently about universal rights often excluded women, non-Europeans, and the poor from their vision of equality. Nevertheless, the Enlightenment established the intellectual framework — individual rights, constitutional government, religious tolerance, scientific progress — that defines the modern world.