The Enlightenment Era

The Enlightenment era (c. 1685–1789) was the intellectual movement that applied the methods of the Scientific Revolution — observation, reason, skepticism of authority — to every domain of human life: politics, economics, religion, education, and social relations. Its thinkers sought to replace tradition, superstition, and tyranny with reason, freedom, and progress.

The movement's geographical center was France, where the philosophes — Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot — produced works that challenged absolutism, religious intolerance, and social inequality. But Enlightenment thinking flourished across Europe and the Americas: Locke and Hume in Britain, Kant in Germany, Franklin and Jefferson in America, Beccaria in Italy. The Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d'Alembert, aimed to compile all human knowledge according to rational principles.

The Enlightenment's core principles — natural rights, government by consent, religious tolerance, freedom of expression, and the improvability of human society through reason and education — became the intellectual foundation of modern liberal democracy. The American, French, and Haitian Revolutions were all, to varying degrees, Enlightenment projects. The era's limitations — its frequent racism, its blindness to the rights of women, its sometimes naive faith in progress — have been extensively critiqued, but its core commitments remain the bedrock of democratic political thought.