The Enlightenment
Learn about the Enlightenment — the 18th-century intellectual movement that championed reason, individual rights, and liberty, inspiring revolutions worldwide.
The Enlightenment (c. 1685–1789) was an intellectual movement centered in France, Britain, and Germany that applied the methods of the Scientific Revolution to politics, society, religion, and human nature. Enlightenment thinkers — the philosophes — argued that reason, not tradition, revelation, or inherited authority, should guide human affairs. Their ideas provided the intellectual ammunition for the revolutionary movements that reshaped the Western world.
The Enlightenment built on the Scientific Revolution's demonstration that the natural world operates according to discoverable laws. Thinkers like John Locke argued that political society, too, was governed by natural principles — that individuals possessed natural rights to life, liberty, and property, and that legitimate government required the consent of the governed. Montesquieu analyzed the separation of powers. Voltaire championed freedom of speech and religion. Rousseau explored the social contract and popular sovereignty.
The Enlightenment's most ambitious project was the Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d'Alembert — an attempt to compile all human knowledge according to rational principles. The movement was not without contradictions: many Enlightenment thinkers held racist views, supported colonialism, or failed to extend their ideals of liberty to women and enslaved people. But their core principles — reason, individual rights, religious tolerance, and government by consent — became the foundation of modern liberal democracy and directly inspired the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions.