enlightenment period meaning essay

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Enlightenment

By: History.com Editors

Updated: February 21, 2020 | Original: December 16, 2009

European politics, philosophy, science and communications were radically reoriented during the course of the “long 18th century” (1685-1815) as part of a movement referred to by its participants as the Age of Reason, or simply the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers in Britain, in France and throughout Europe questioned traditional authority and embraced the notion that humanity could be improved through rational change. 

The Enlightenment produced numerous books, essays, inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars and revolutions. The American and French Revolutions were directly inspired by Enlightenment ideals and respectively marked the peak of its influence and the beginning of its decline. The Enlightenment ultimately gave way to 19th-century Romanticism.

The Early Enlightenment: 1685-1730

The Enlightenment’s important 17th-century precursors included the Englishmen Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, the Frenchman René Descartes and the key natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution, including Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Its roots are usually traced to 1680s England, where in the span of three years Isaac Newton published his “Principia Mathematica” (1686) and John Locke his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1689)—two works that provided the scientific, mathematical and philosophical toolkit for the Enlightenment’s major advances.

Did you know? In his essay 'What Is Enlightenment?' (1784), the German philosopher Immanuel Kant summed up the era's motto in the following terms: 'Dare to know! Have courage to use your own reason!'

Locke argued that human nature was mutable and that knowledge was gained through accumulated experience rather than by accessing some sort of outside truth. Newton’s calculus and optical theories provided the powerful Enlightenment metaphors for precisely measured change and illumination.

There was no single, unified Enlightenment. Instead, it is possible to speak of the French Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment and the English, German, Swiss or American Enlightenment. Individual Enlightenment thinkers often had very different approaches. Locke differed from David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau from Voltaire , Thomas Jefferson from Frederick the Great . Their differences and disagreements, though, emerged out of the common Enlightenment themes of rational questioning and belief in progress through dialogue.

The High Enlightenment: 1730-1780

Centered on the dialogues and publications of the French “philosophes” (Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Buffon and Denis Diderot), the High Enlightenment might best be summed up by one historian’s summary of Voltaire’s “Philosophical Dictionary”: “a chaos of clear ideas.” Foremost among these was the notion that everything in the universe could be rationally demystified and cataloged. The signature publication of the period was Diderot’s “Encyclopédie” (1751-77), which brought together leading authors to produce an ambitious compilation of human knowledge.

It was an age of enlightened despots like Frederick the Great, who unified, rationalized and modernized Prussia in between brutal multi-year wars with Austria, and of enlightened would-be revolutionaries like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, whose “Declaration of Independence” (1776) framed the American Revolution in terms taken from of Locke’s essays.

It was also a time of religious (and anti-religious) innovation, as Christians sought to reposition their faith along rational lines and deists and materialists argued that the universe seemed to determine its own course without God’s intervention. Locke, along with French philosopher Pierre Bayle, began to champion the idea of the separation of Church and State. Secret societies—like the Freemasons, the Bavarian Illuminati and the Rosicrucians—flourished, offering European men (and a few women) new modes of fellowship, esoteric ritual and mutual assistance. Coffeehouses, newspapers and literary salons emerged as new venues for ideas to circulate.

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The Late Enlightenment and Beyond: 1780-1815

The French Revolution of 1789 was the culmination of the High Enlightenment vision of throwing out the old authorities to remake society along rational lines, but it devolved into bloody terror that showed the limits of its own ideas and led, a decade later, to the rise of Napoleon . Still, its goal of egalitarianism attracted the admiration of the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley) and inspired both the Haitian war of independence and the radical racial inclusivism of Paraguay’s first post-independence government.

Enlightened rationality gave way to the wildness of Romanticism, but 19th-century Liberalism and Classicism—not to mention 20th-century Modernism —all owe a heavy debt to the thinkers of the Enlightenment.

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The Enlightenment

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The Enlightenment (Age of Reason) was a revolution in thought in Europe and North America from the late 17th century to the late 18th century. The Enlightenment involved new approaches in philosophy , science , and politics. Above all, the human capacity for reason was championed as the tool by which our knowledge could be extended, individual liberty maintained, and happiness secured.

Origins of the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is usually dated from the last quarter of the 17th century to the last quarter of the 18th century. During the Renaissance (1400-1600), when intellectuals and artists looked back to antiquity for inspiration, there arose the humanist movement, which stressed the promotion of civic virtue, that is, realising a person's full potential both for their own good and for the good of the society in which they live. The ideas of the Enlightenment flourished from these roots and blossomed thanks to events like the Protestant Reformation (1517-1648), which diminished the traditional power of the Christian Church in everyday life. Most enlightened thinkers did not want to replace the Church, but they did want greater religious freedom and toleration.

The Enlightenment derives its name 'light' from the contrast to what was then seen as the 'darkness' of the Middle Ages. We now know that the medieval period was perhaps not quite as 'dark' as once thought, but the essential fact remains that religion , superstition, and deference to authority did permeate that period of human existence before philosophers began to challenge these concepts in the 17th century. It was no longer possible to simply accept received wisdom as truth just because it had been unchallenged for centuries.

In this new atmosphere of relative intellectual freedom, reason challenged accepted beliefs. Just like the practical experiments scientists were conducting in the Scientific Revolution to discover the laws of nature, so, too, philosophers were keen to apply reason to age-old problems of how we should live together in societies, how we can be virtuous, what is the best form of government, and what constitutes happiness. This was a battle of reason against emotion, superstition, and fear; its principal weapons were optimism for a better world and both the freedom and ability to question absolutely everything. Not for nothing were the new enlightened philosophers also called 'free-thinkers'.

Pre-Enlightenment Thinkers

The Enlightenment was driven forward by philosophers, although given that many were also writers of non-philosophical works or even dabbled in politics, they might be better described today as intellectuals. These thinkers challenged accepted thought and, it is important to stress, each other, since there was never any consensus as to the answers to the questions everyone was trying to answer. What is sure is this process of examining and building knowledge was a long one, with different strands in different places. With hindsight, we can reconstruct the chain of ideas we collectively call the Enlightenment, but the participants at that time were aware that they were involved in a new movement of thought.

There is a group of thinkers who are often called 'pre-Enlightenment' philosophers since they established some of the key foundations upon which the Enlightenment was built. This group includes Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), René Descartes (1596-1650), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), and John Locke (1632-1704).

Bacon stressed the need for a new combined method of empirical experimentation (i.e. observation and experience) and shared data collection so that humanity might finally discover all of nature's secrets and improve itself. This approach was adopted by many enlightened philosophers. Bacon's thoughts on the need to test our knowledge to see if it is actually true and his belief that we could build a better world if we all applied ourselves were also influential.

Hobbes, an English politician and thinker, proposed the idea of a state of nature , a brutish existence before we got together into societies. Hobbes believed that citizens must sacrifice some liberties in order to gain the security of society, and they do this when they form a social contract between themselves, that is, a collective promise to abide by certain rules of behaviour. He also believed, because of his pessimistic view of human nature, where people act entirely out of self-interest, that a very strong political authority was required, his Leviathan, named after the biblical monster. These ideas and Hobbes' attempt to disentangle philosophy, morality, and politics from religion would all inspire Enlightenment thinkers, either in support or in providing alternative models.

Descartes, a French rationalist philosopher, proposed that all knowledge must be subjected to doubt because our senses are unreliable, we may be dreaming, or we may be living in a deception created by an evil demon. Descartes' conclusion of applying doubt to everything is his founding principle of indubitable truth Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"). From Decartes' ideas came Cartesianism and the position that the mind and body (or matter) are two distinct things but, in some way that thinkers had yet to determine, they interact with each other. While some critics point out that Descartes' hunting down of doubts can lead to absurdities and total scepticism, his strategy has importance for the Enlightenment since it demonstrates the value of questioning everything and not taking at face value knowledge we have inherited from previous generations – knowledge that may, in fact, turn out to be not knowledge at all but only belief.

The Dutchman Spinoza attacked superstition and challenged the traditional role of God in human affairs, suggesting God does not interfere in our everyday lives. Combining rationalism and metaphysics, Spinoza was greatly interested in science and believed that by using our reason and studying nature we could come to better know ourselves and the divine. He also called for greater religious toleration.

The Englishman Locke proposed that there should be limits on state power in order to guarantee certain liberties, especially the right to hold property, which he considered a natural right (i.e. it is not given by a government or law code). Locke's perfect state has a separation of powers, and the government can only operate if it has the consent of the people. Further, citizens can overthrow a government if it does not perform its role of protecting their rights. Locke believed humans can work together for a common good. He believed that individuals are more important than institutions like absolute monarchs and the Church. He believed that all citizens are equal and the state should educate its citizens to be reasoned and tolerant citizens. More than any other thinker, perhaps, Locke's ideas not only inspired other thinkers but also influenced real-world affairs.

There were many other thinkers that influenced the Enlightenment, but space precludes discussion of them here; men like the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), who believed that all knowledge was interconnected. In short, a whole body of international thinkers had already come up with the essential playing cards of the Enlightenment game before it had even started. Later philosophers now reshuffled these, selected some, and rejected others in their search for the winning hand of just how humans should live and knowledge be acquired.

10 Key Enlightenment Thinkers

Having set the foundation, then, a new wave of thinkers set about building a new edifice of Western knowledge. Disagreeing just as often they agreed with each other, all of the thinkers had the common objective of finding a better world to live in.

One of the first texts of the Enlightenment proper was the 1687 Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Newton's book is in many ways a culmination of the Scientific Revolution, and it presents the view that the world around us can be understood, and the best tool for that purpose is science, in particular, mathematics. In his discovery of the force of gravity (and others besides), Newton showed that empiricism and deduction were the best methods to increase knowledge. Philosophers took this approach in their own work. Newton also showed that there was harmony and order in nature, which was something that philosophers sought to recreate in human society.

The French philosophe Montesquieu (1689-1757) was mostly concerned with avoiding authoritarian government. Going beyond Locke, he researched the history of politics – essentially founding political science – and famously articulated a separation of powers between the executive, legislative, and judiciary. He is another thinker who advocates the protection of individual liberty through laws, non-government interference, and toleration. To give an idea of the battle with the Establishment many enlightened thinkers had to face, Montesquieu's book The Spirit of the Laws was put on the Catholic Church's Index of Prohibited Books in 1751.

The French author Voltaire (1694-1778) "more than any other represented the Enlightenment to his contemporaries" (Chisick, 430). Less an original philosopher and more a destroyer of the old attitudes, Voltaire was critical of the power of the Catholic Church, he called for more individual liberty and religious toleration, and championed our power of reason and innate capacity for moral behaviour. Voltaire also chastised philosophers for not coming up with practical solutions to society's problems.

David Hume (1711-1776) was a Scottish philosopher, who presented a positive view of human nature – we all possess a capacity for sympathy and a natural moral sense – but a sceptical view of religion's usefulness. Hume believed knowledge comes only from experience and observation but also acknowledged there are some things we can never know such as, why is there evil in the world? Hume expanded the notion of reason to include emotion.

The Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) contributed with his mixing of Hobbes and Locke in stating that humans in a state of nature are free, equal, and have two basic instincts: a sense of self-preservation and a pity for others. The people must gather in a community based on consent and with the ultimate objective of that society being the common good. For Rousseau, the general will is a compromise where individuals sacrifice complete liberty to achieve the next best option: a restriction on liberty in order to avoid a situation of no liberty at all. Whatever the general will turns out to be, that is the right one. Rousseau does recognise the need for a system of laws and strong government to guide the general will of the people when it might inadvertently err and to protect property, for him, an unfortunate creation of society. Rousseau was also concerned with ridding society of its obvious inequalities and injustices by having the state encourage its citizens through education to adopt a less self-interested approach to community life.

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The thoughts of the Frenchman Denis Diderot (1713-1784) may be summarised as a humanistic belief in individual autonomy and the positive use of modern, non-religious, and, if possible, scientific arguments and methods to challenge age-old knowledge based on faith and superstition alone. Diderot was editor of the multivolume Encyclopedia , often described as the ' Bible of the Enlightenment' and summarised by N. Hampson as "an anthology of 'enlightened' opinions on politics, philosophy, and religion" (86). Diderot spent time advising both Catherine the Great (empress regent of Russia, 1762-1796) and Frederick the Great in Prussia (l. 1712-1786), examples of so-called 'Enlightened despots'.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was a Scottish philosopher and economist. He believed that economics is a science and follows certain laws, what he called the 'Invisible Hand'. These laws, like any laws of nature, can be discovered through the use of reason. Smith called for free trade and limited interference in markets by governments, for which he is seen as the founder of liberal economics. A. Gottlieb describes Smith's The Wealth of Nations as "the founding text of modern economics" (198).

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) challenged the dominance of empiricism and rationalism in Enlightenment thought as he believed that some knowledge must be independent of sensation, examples given include our concepts of space and time. These things are a priori knowledge, things that we can think about without ever experiencing them directly. Consequently, Kant shifted the focus of philosophy to an examination of general concepts and categories. In ethics, Kant stated that moral worth comes from a person's intentions and not from the results of their actions, which could be accidental. Good actions spring from following rules without exceptions like "never tell lies", what he called categorical imperatives. Kant also stressed the need for toleration, education, and cooperation between nations.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) stated that any nation and its institutions, including religious ones, were a product of a rich and long history, and so one particular generation should not simply cast away such time-tested guardians of our safety and liberty. Burke also thought that intuition and imagination were just as important tools as reason in understanding our world.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809), in his pamphlet Common Sense , famously called for the American colonies to rebel against British rule. Paine denounced slavery, was opposed to any form of privilege, believed all men are equal and should have the right to vote, and he called for a system of progressive taxation that could fund a fairer society.

Here we have considered only ten enlightened thinkers, but there were, of course, many more, but, unfortunately, space precludes their mention. The trend to apply enlightened thought to practical everyday problems was continued. Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794) called for prison reform and the end of excessive punishments for criminals. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) called for equal education opportunities for men and women and stressed the benefits to society of improving the situation of women. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) offered a way to measure the success of new laws with his utilitarianism and its "greatest happiness of the greatest number principle". Thinking about a better world had been the priority of the Enlightenment, but as the 18th century wore on, actually making one became the new priority.

A Great Mixing of Ideas

For ideas to spread and take root, there needed to be interaction between intellectuals, and this was achieved (beyond merely physically visiting each other) by several new means. The printing press allowed not only books to be distributed relatively cheaply but also treatises, pamphlets, and magazines. Never before had so much paper been passed across Europe. Ideas, and perhaps even more importantly, critical reaction to those ideas, and so the stimulus for yet more ideas, could be spread faster than ever before.

Another means for intellectuals to interact was the rise of academies and societies, where papers were published in in-house magazines, and meetings and debates were held. People also met in coffee houses to discuss new ideas. Yet another means of spreading ideas was the salon, particularly in Paris , although soon the idea caught on everywhere. These salons, so often managed by women, further aided the transmission of ideas not only between intellectuals but also different sections of society. For the first time, perhaps, philosophers, artists, politicians, and business people were able to meet together informally. Further, there was even some mixing of different levels of society in salons since the intellectuals and artistic creators could now meet aristocrats and those with great wealth, a meeting that often led to patronage, and so yet more ideas could be created.

The Impact of the Enlightenment

A key idea of enlightened thinkers was the belief that human existence could be improved through human endeavour. Developments in science and technology as well as progressive thinking in political philosophy meant that a better standard of living could be achieved for everyone. Reforms were championed that reduced society's inequalities and diminished the impact of such negative but all-too-present phenomena as famine, disease, and poverty. Reformers called for real change in education so that more young people could attend school and become better citizens by developing their natural ability to reason. Just as individuals were to be left to pursue their own liberty and happiness in the new politics of liberalism, there developed the idea of laissez-faire economics, that is, minimising government interference to let the economy develop as the markets dictated it should. Modern liberal democracies then are based on the Enlightenment idea that some areas of life are no business of the state, a marked difference to societies of the Middle Ages.

To these general consequences of the Enlightenment, there can be added definite practical ones. As the Enlightenment specialist N. Hampson notes, the danger of studying the Enlightenment only in intellectual terms can lead to the conclusion that "the Enlightenment was everything in general and nothing in particular" (Cameron, 296). Some practical particulars include the end of the persecution of heretics, no more witches being burnt at the stake, serfdom coming to its final stage, and torture being removed from judicial processes. There were powerful movements to end slavery and the death penalty. The Church was formally separated from the state in some places, notably France. More universities and libraries were founded. Greater fairness was achieved in electoral systems.

The impact of the progress in science would be seen in the British Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) and its counterparts across the world. Many enlightened thinkers also foresaw the darker side of 'progress', such as an unrestrained individualism opposed to the common good and minority-controlled technological development that alienated large groups of people and destroyed the environment.

It was not just the intellectuals who believed they could shape a better future. It took a long time for the high ideas of intellectuals to filter down to the lower classes, but descend they eventually did. Ordinary people of all classes now considered taking direct action to improve their lot in life and the political systems in which they lived. The two clearest examples of this action for a better world are the French Revolution and the American Revolutionary War . Revolutionaries in both events were inspired by and frequently quoted the works of enlightened philosophers; their revolutionary documents like the French Bill of Rights and the US Declaration of Independence were replete with the language these philosophers were using such as "inalienable rights" and "pursuit of happiness".

Criticisms of the Enlightenment

In some areas like the arts, there was a reaction to the Enlightenment and the new dominance of reason. This reaction was seen most clearly in the movement we call Romanticism (1775-1830), where, in literature and art, emphasis was given to new forms and modes of emotional and spontaneous expression.

Other critics of the Enlightenment lament its contradictory results such as a possible overemphasis on individuals and yet also a strong state. Critics point to the rejection of cultural traditions, the reduction in value of faith and religious beliefs, that economic, scientific, and technological 'progress' is, in fact, only 'regression' in terms of our humanity, and that the Eurocentric philosophers were ignorant of what makes humans different in different places (or even the same place). In short, the Enlightenment has been blamed for all the ills of modernity, whether it be the Holocaust or the destruction of the Brazilian rainforest. One might counterargue, and plenty of historians have, that such blanket criticisms can only be made against the Enlightenment if one takes it as an entirely homogenous collection of ideas, something this article hopefully discourages.

Into the 21st century, the achievements of the Enlightenment, particularly liberty, freedom of thought, and toleration are still in existence in many places, but certainly not everywhere. As the historian H. Chisick points out these freedoms are not immune to ever-present threats like racism, political extremism, and religious fanaticism:

Apparently, the key values of the Enlightenment are not acquired once and for all. Rather, they must be appropriated by each generation and each culture in turn, or they will be submerged and lost. (160)

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Bibliography

• Chisick, Harvey. Historical Dictionary of the Enlightenment . Scarecrow Press, 2005.
• Gottlieb, Anthony. The Dream of Enlightenment. Liveright, 2016.
• Hampson, Norman. The Enlightenment. Penguin Books, 1991.
• Isaiah Berlin. Age of Enlightenment[The Mentor Philosophers Series]. New American Library, 1963.
• Law, Stephen. The Great Philosophers. Quercus, 2009.
• Popkin, R H et al. Philosophy Made Simple . Routledge, 1993.
• Robertson, Ritchie. The Enlightenment. Harper, 2021.
• Yolton, John W. & Rogers, Pat & Porter, Roy & Stafford, Barbara. A Companion to the Enlightenment . Wiley-Blackwell, 1991.

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Enlightenment

The heart of the eighteenth century Enlightenment is the loosely organized activity of prominent French thinkers of the mid-decades of the eighteenth century, the so-called “ philosophes ”(e.g., Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot, Montesquieu). The philosophes constituted an informal society of men of letters who collaborated on a loosely defined project of Enlightenment exemplified by the project of the Encyclopedia (see below 1.5). However, there are noteworthy centers of Enlightenment outside of France as well. There is a renowned Scottish Enlightenment (key figures are Frances Hutcheson, Adam Smith, David Hume, Thomas Reid), a German Enlightenment ( die Aufklärung , key figures of which include Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, G.E. Lessing and Immanuel Kant), and there are also other hubs of Enlightenment and Enlightenment thinkers scattered throughout Europe and America in the eighteenth century.

What makes for the unity of such tremendously diverse thinkers under the label of “Enlightenment”? For the purposes of this entry, the Enlightenment is conceived broadly. D’Alembert, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, characterizes his eighteenth century, in the midst of it, as “the century of philosophy par excellence ”, because of the tremendous intellectual and scientific progress of the age, but also because of the expectation of the age that philosophy (in the broad sense of the time, which includes the natural and social sciences) would dramatically improve human life. Guided by D’Alembert’s characterization of his century, the Enlightenment is conceived here as having its primary origin in the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. The rise of the new science progressively undermines not only the ancient geocentric conception of the cosmos, but also the set of presuppositions that had served to constrain and guide philosophical inquiry in the earlier times. The dramatic success of the new science in explaining the natural world promotes philosophy from a handmaiden of theology, constrained by its purposes and methods, to an independent force with the power and authority to challenge the old and construct the new, in the realms both of theory and practice, on the basis of its own principles. Taking as the core of the Enlightenment the aspiration for intellectual progress, and the belief in the power of such progress to improve human society and individual lives, this entry includes descriptions of relevant aspects of the thought of earlier thinkers, such as Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, Bayle, Leibniz, and Spinoza, thinkers whose contributions are indispensable to understanding the eighteenth century as “the century of philosophy par excellence ”.

The Enlightenment is often associated with its political revolutions and ideals, especially the French Revolution of 1789. The energy created and expressed by the intellectual foment of Enlightenment thinkers contributes to the growing wave of social unrest in France in the eighteenth century. The social unrest comes to a head in the violent political upheaval which sweeps away the traditionally and hierarchically structured ancien régime (the monarchy, the privileges of the nobility, the political power of the Catholic Church). The French revolutionaries meant to establish in place of the ancien régime a new reason-based order instituting the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality. Though the Enlightenment, as a diverse intellectual and social movement, has no definite end, the devolution of the French Revolution into the Terror in the 1790s, corresponding, as it roughly does, with the end of the eighteenth century and the rise of opposed movements, such as Romanticism, can serve as a convenient marker of the end of the Enlightenment, conceived as an historical period.

For Enlightenment thinkers themselves, however, the Enlightenment is not an historical period, but a process of social, psychological or spiritual development, unbound to time or place. Immanuel Kant defines “enlightenment” in his famous contribution to debate on the question in an essay entitled “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), as humankind’s release from its self-incurred immaturity; “immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” Expressing convictions shared among Enlightenment thinkers of widely divergent doctrines, Kant identifies enlightenment with the process of undertaking to think for oneself, to employ and rely on one’s own intellectual capacities in determining what to believe and how to act. Enlightenment philosophers from across the geographical and temporal spectrum tend to have a great deal of confidence in humanity’s intellectual powers, both to achieve systematic knowledge of nature and to serve as an authoritative guide in practical life. This confidence is generally paired with suspicion or hostility toward other forms or carriers of authority (such as tradition, superstition, prejudice, myth and miracles), insofar as these are seen to compete with the authority of one’s own reason and experience. Enlightenment philosophy tends to stand in tension with established religion, insofar as the release from self-incurred immaturity in this age, daring to think for oneself, awakening one’s intellectual powers, generally requires opposing the role of established religion in directing thought and action. The faith of the Enlightenment – if one may call it that – is that the process of enlightenment, of becoming progressively self-directed in thought and action through the awakening of one’s intellectual powers, leads ultimately to a better, more fulfilled human existence.

This entry describes the main tendencies of Enlightenment thought in the following main sections: (1) The True: Science, Epistemology, and Metaphysics in the Enlightenment; (2) The Good: Political Theory, Ethical Theory and Religion in the Enlightenment; (3) The Beautiful: Aesthetics in the Enlightenment.

1.1 Rationalism and the Enlightenment

1.2 empiricism and the enlightenment, 1.3 skepticism in the enlightenment, 1.4 science of man and subjectivism in the enlightenment, 1.5 emerging sciences and the encyclopedia, 2.1 political theory, 2.2 ethical theory, 2.3 religion and the enlightenment, 3.1 french classicism and german rationalism, 3.2 empiricism and subjectivism, 3.3 late enlightenment aesthetics, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the true: science, epistemology and metaphysics in the enlightenment.

In this era dedicated to human progress, the advancement of the natural sciences is regarded as the main exemplification of, and fuel for, such progress. Isaac Newton’s epochal accomplishment in his Principia Mathematica (1687), which, very briefly described, consists in the comprehension of a diversity of physical phenomena – in particular the motions of heavenly bodies, together with the motions of sublunary bodies – in few relatively simple, universally applicable, mathematical laws, was a great stimulus to the intellectual activity of the eighteenth century and served as a model and inspiration for the researches of a number of Enlightenment thinkers. Newton’s system strongly encourages the Enlightenment conception of nature as an orderly domain governed by strict mathematical-dynamical laws and the conception of ourselves as capable of knowing those laws and of plumbing the secrets of nature through the exercise of our unaided faculties. – The conception of nature, and of how we know it, changes significantly with the rise of modern science. It belongs centrally to the agenda of Enlightenment philosophy to contribute to the new knowledge of nature, and to provide a metaphysical framework within which to place and interpret this new knowledge.

René Descartes’ rationalist system of philosophy is one of the pillars on which Enlightenment thought rests. Descartes (1596–1650) undertakes to establish the sciences upon a secure metaphysical foundation. The famous method of doubt Descartes employs for this purpose exemplifies (in part through exaggerating) an attitude characteristic of the Enlightenment. According to Descartes, the investigator in foundational philosophical research ought to doubt all propositions that can be doubted. The investigator determines whether a proposition is dubitable by attempting to construct a possible scenario under which it is false. In the domain of fundamental scientific (philosophical) research, no other authority but one’s own conviction is to be trusted, and not one’s own conviction either, until it is subjected to rigorous skeptical questioning. With his method, Descartes casts doubt upon the senses as authoritative source of knowledge. He finds that God and the immaterial soul are both better known, on the basis of innate ideas, than objects of the senses. Through his famous doctrine of the dualism of mind and body, that mind and body are two distinct substances, each with its own essence, the material world (allegedly) known through the senses becomes denominated as an “external” world, insofar as it is external to the ideas with which one immediately communes in one’s consciousness. Descartes’ investigation thus establishes one of the central epistemological problems, not only of the Enlightenment, but also of modernity: the problem of objectivity in our empirical knowledge. If our evidence for the truth of propositions about extra-mental material reality is always restricted to mental content, content before the mind, how can we ever be certain that the extra-mental reality is not other than we represent it as being? Descartes’ solution depends on our having secured prior and certain knowledge of God. In fact, Descartes argues that all human knowledge (not only knowledge of the material world through the senses) depends on metaphysical knowledge of God.

Despite Descartes’ grounding of all scientific knowledge in metaphysical knowledge of God, his system contributes significantly to the advance of natural science in the period. He attacks the long-standing assumptions of the scholastic-aristotelians whose intellectual dominance stood in the way of the development of the new science; he developed a conception of matter that enabled mechanical explanation of physical phenomena; and he developed some of the fundamental mathematical resources – in particular, a way to employ algebraic equations to solve geometrical problems – that enabled the physical domain to be explained with precise, simple mathematical formulae. Furthermore, his grounding of physics, and all knowledge, in a relatively simple and elegant rationalist metaphysics provides a model of a rigorous and complete secular system of knowledge. Though major Enlightenment thinkers (for example Voltaire in his Letters on the English Nation , 1734) embrace Newton’s physical system in preference to Descartes’, Newton’s system itself depends on Descartes’ earlier work, a dependence to which Newton himself attests.

Cartesian philosophy also ignites various controversies in the latter decades of the seventeenth century that provide the context of intellectual tumult out of which the Enlightenment springs. Among these controversies are the following: Are mind and body really two distinct sorts of substances, and if so, what is the nature of each, and how are they related to each other, both in the human being (which presumably “has” both a mind and a body) and in a unified world system? If matter is inert (as Descartes claims), what can be the source of motion and the nature of causality in the physical world? And of course the various epistemological problems: the problem of objectivity, the role of God in securing our knowledge, the doctrine of innate ideas, and others.

Baruch Spinoza’s systematic rationalist metaphysics, which he develops in his Ethics (1677) in part in response to problems in the Cartesian system, is also an important basis for Enlightenment thought. Spinoza develops, in contrast to Cartesian dualism, an ontological monism according to which there is only one substance, God or nature, with two attributes, corresponding to mind and body. Spinoza’s denial, on the basis of strict philosophical reasoning, of the existence of a transcendent supreme being, his identification of God with nature, gives strong impetus to the strands of atheism and naturalism that thread through Enlightenment philosophy. Spinoza’s rationalist principles also lead him to assert a strict determinism and to deny any role to final causes or teleology in explanation. (See Israel 2001.)

The rationalist metaphysics of Leibniz (1646–1716) is also foundational for the Enlightenment, particularly the German Enlightenment ( die Aufklärung ), one prominent expression of which is the Leibnizian rationalist system of Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Leibniz articulates, and places at the head of metaphysics, the great rationalist principle, the principle of sufficient reason, which states that everything that exists has a sufficient reason for its existence. This principle exemplifies the characteristic conviction of the Enlightenment that the universe is thoroughly rationally intelligible. The question arises of how this principle itself can be known or grounded. Wolff attempts to derive it from the logical principle of non-contradiction (in his First Philosophy or Ontology , 1730). Criticism of this alleged derivation gives rise to the general question of how formal principles of logic can possibly serve to ground substantive knowledge of reality. Whereas Leibniz exerts his influence through scattered writings on various topics, some of which elaborate plans for a systematic metaphysics which are never executed by Leibniz himself, Wolff exerts his influence on the German Enlightenment through his development of a rationalist system of knowledge in which he attempts to demonstrate all the propositions of science from first principles, known a priori.

Wolff’s rationalist metaphysics is characteristic of the Enlightenment by virtue of the pretensions of human reason within it, not by reason’s success in establishing its claims. Much the same could be said of the great rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century. Through their articulation of the ideal of scientia, of a complete science of reality, composed of propositions derived demonstratively from a priori first principles, these philosophers exert great influence on the Enlightenment. But they fail, rather spectacularly, to realize this ideal. To the contrary, what they bequeath to the eighteenth century is metaphysics, in the words of Kant, as “a battlefield of endless controversies.” However, the controversies themselves – regarding the nature of God, mind, matter, substance, cause, et cetera, and the relations of each of these to the others – provide tremendous fuel to Enlightenment thought.

Despite the confidence in and enthusiasm for human reason in the Enlightenment – it is sometimes called “the Age of Reason” – the rise of empiricism, both in the practice of science and in the theory of knowledge, is characteristic of the period. The enthusiasm for reason in the Enlightenment is primarily not for the faculty of reason as an independent source of knowledge, which is embattled in the period, but rather for the human cognitive faculties generally; the Age of Reason contrasts with an age of religious faith, not with an age of sense experience. Though the great seventeenth century rationalist metaphysical systems of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz exert tremendous influence on philosophy in the Enlightenment; moreover, and though the eighteenth-century Enlightenment has a rationalist strain (perhaps best exemplified by the system of Christian Wolff), nevertheless, that the Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert is dedicated to three empiricists (Francis Bacon, John Locke and Isaac Newton), signals the ascendency of empiricism in the period.

If the founder of the rationalist strain of the Enlightenment is Descartes, then the founder of the empiricist strain is Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Though Bacon’s work belongs to the Renaissance, the revolution he undertook to effect in the sciences inspires and influences Enlightenment thinkers. The Enlightenment, as the age in which experimental natural science matures and comes into its own, admires Bacon as “the father of experimental philosophy.” Bacon’s revolution (enacted in, among other works, The New Organon , 1620) involves conceiving the new science as (1) founded on empirical observation and experimentation; (2) arrived at through the method of induction; and (3) as ultimately aiming at, and as confirmed by, enhanced practical capacities (hence the Baconian motto, “knowledge is power”).

Of these elements of Bacon’s revolution, the point about method deserves special emphasis. Isaac Newton’s work, which stands as the great exemplar of the accomplishments of natural science for the eighteenth century, is, like Bacon’s, based on the inductive method. Whereas rationalist of the seventeenth century tend to conceive of scientific knowledge of nature as consisting in a system in which statements expressing the observable phenomena of nature are deduced from first principles, known a priori, Newton’s method begins with the observed phenomena of nature and reduces its multiplicity to unity by induction, that is, by finding mathematical laws or principles from which the observed phenomena can be derived or explained. The evident success of Newton’s “bottom-up” procedure contrasts sharply with the seemingly endless and fruitless conflicts among philosophers regarding the meaning and validity of first principles of reason, and this contrast naturally favors the rise of the Newtonian (or Baconian) method of acquiring knowledge of nature in the eighteenth century.

The tendency of natural science toward progressive independence from metaphysics in the eighteenth century is correlated with this point about method. The rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries proceeds through its separation from the presuppositions, doctrines and methodology of theology; natural science in the eighteenth century proceeds to separate itself from metaphysics as well. Newton proves the capacity of natural science to succeed independently of a priori, clear and certain first principles. The characteristic Enlightenment suspicion of all allegedly authoritative claims the validity of which is obscure, which is directed first of all against religious dogmas, extends to the claims of metaphysics as well. While there are significant Enlightenment thinkers who are metaphysicians – again, one thinks of Christian Wolff – the general thrust of Enlightenment thought is anti-metaphysical.

John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) is another foundational text of the Enlightenment. A main source of its influence is the epistemological rigor that it displays, which is at least implicitly anti-metaphysical. Locke undertakes in this work to examine the human understanding in order to determine the limits of human knowledge; he thereby institutes a prominent pattern of Enlightenment epistemology. Locke finds the source of all our ideas, the ideas out of which human knowledge is constructed, in the senses and argues influentially against the rationalists’ doctrine of innate ideas. Locke’s sensationalism exerts great influence in the French Enlightenment, primarily through being taken up and radicalized by the philosophe , Abbé de Condillac. In the Treatise on Sensations (1754), Condillac attempts to explain how all human knowledge arises out of sense experience. Locke’s epistemology, as developed by Condillac and others, contributes greatly to the emerging science of psychology in the period.

Locke and Descartes both pursue a method in epistemology that brings with it the epistemological problem of objectivity. Both examine our knowledge by way of examining the ideas we encounter directly in our consciousness. This method comes to be called “the way of ideas”. Though neither for Locke nor for Descartes do all of our ideas represent their objects by way of resembling them (e.g., our idea of God does not represent God by virtue of resembling God), our alleged knowledge of our environment through the senses does depend largely on ideas that allegedly resemble external material objects. The way of ideas implies the epistemological problem of how we can know that these ideas do in fact resemble their objects. How can we be sure that these objects do not appear one way before the mind and exist in another way (or not at all) in reality outside the mind? George Berkeley, an empiricist philosopher influenced by John Locke, avoids the problem by asserting the metaphysics of idealism: the (apparently material) objects of perception are nothing but ideas before the mind. However, Berkeley’s idealism is less influential in, and characteristic of, the Enlightenment, than the opposing positions of materialism and Cartesian dualism. Thomas Reid, a prominent member of the Scottish Enlightenment, attacks the way of ideas and argues that the immediate objects of our (sense) perception are the common (material) objects in our environment, not ideas in our mind. Reid mounts his defense of naïve realism as a defense of common sense over against the doctrines of the philosophers. The defense of common sense, and the related idea that the results of philosophy ought to be of use to common people, are characteristic ideas of the Enlightenment, particularly pronounced in the Scottish Enlightenment.

Skepticism enjoys a remarkably strong place in Enlightenment philosophy, given that confidence in our intellectual capacities to achieve systematic knowledge of nature is a leading characteristic of the age. This oddity is at least softened by the point that much skepticism in the Enlightenment is merely methodological, a tool meant to serve science, rather than a position embraced on its own account. The instrumental role for skepticism is exemplified prominently in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), in which Descartes employs radical skeptical doubt to attack prejudices derived from learning and from sense experience and to search out principles known with certainty which may serve as a secure foundation for a new system of knowledge. Given the negative, critical, suspicious attitude of the Enlightenment towards doctrines traditionally regarded as well founded, it is not surprising that Enlightenment thinkers employ skeptical tropes (drawn from the ancient skeptical tradition) to attack traditional dogmas in science, metaphysics and religion.

However, skepticism is not merely a methodological tool in the hands of Enlightenment thinkers. The skeptical cast of mind is one prominent manifestation of the Enlightenment spirit. The influence of Pierre Bayle, another founding figure of the Enlightenment, testifies to this. Bayle was a French Protestant, who, like many European philosophers of his time, was forced to live and work in politically liberal and tolerant Holland in order to avoid censorship and prison. Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), a strange and wonderful book, exerts great influence on the age. The form of the book is intimidating: a biographical dictionary, with long scholarly entries on obscure figures in the history of culture, interrupted by long scholarly footnotes, which are in turn interrupted by further footnotes. Rarely has a work with such intimidating scholarly pretentions exerted such radical and liberating influence in the culture. It exerts this influence through its skeptical questioning of religious, metaphysical, and scientific dogmas. Bayle’s eclecticism and his tendency to follow arguments without pre-arranging their conclusions make it difficult to categorize his thought. It is the attitude of inquiry that Bayle displays, rather than any doctrine he espouses, that mark his as distinctively Enlightenment thought. He is fearless and presumptuous in questioning all manner of dogma. His attitude of inquiry resembles both that of Descartes’ meditator and that of the person undergoing enlightenment as Kant defines it, the attitude of coming to think for oneself, of daring to know. This epistemological attitude, as manifest in distrust of authority and reliance on one’s own capacity to judge, expresses the Enlightenment values of individualism and self-determination.

This skeptical/critical attitude underlies a significant tension in the age. While it is common to conceive of the Enlightenment as supplanting the authority of tradition and religious dogma with the authority of reason, in fact the Enlightenment is characterized by a crisis of authority regarding any belief. This is perhaps best illustrated with reference to David Hume’s skepticism, as developed in Book One of A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and in his later Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding (1748). While one might take Hume’s skepticism to imply that he is an outlier with respect to the Enlightenment, it is more convincing to see Hume’s skepticism as a flowering of a crisis regarding authority in belief that is internal to the Enlightenment. Hume articulates a variety of skepticisms. His “skepticism with regard to the senses” is structured by the epistemological problem bound up with the way of ideas, described above. Hume also articulates skepticism with regard to reason in an argument that is anticipated by Bayle. Hume begins this argument by noting that, though rules or principles in demonstrative sciences are certain or infallible, given the fallibility of our faculties, our applications of such rules or principles in demonstrative inferences yield conclusions that cannot be regarded as certain or infallible. On reflection, our conviction in the conclusions of demonstrative reasoning must be qualified by an assessment of the likelihood that we made a mistake in our reasoning. Thus, Hume writes, “all knowledge degenerates into probability” ( Treatise , I.iv.i). Hume argues further that, given this degeneration, for any judgment, our assessment of the likelihood that we made a mistake, and the corresponding diminution of certainty in the conclusion, is another judgment about which we ought make a further assessment, which leads to a further diminution of certainty in our original conclusion, leading “at last [to] a total extinction of belief and evidence”. Hume also famously questions the justification of inductive reasoning and causal reasoning. According to Hume’s argument, since in causal reasoning we take our past observations to serve as evidence for judgments regarding what will happen in relevantly similar circumstances in the future, causal reasoning depends on the assumption that the future course of nature will resemble the past; and there is no non-circular justification of this essential assumption. Hume concludes that we have no rational justification for our causal or inductive judgments. Hume’s skeptical arguments regarding causal reasoning are more radical than his skeptical questioning of reason as such, insofar as they call into question even experience itself as a ground for knowledge and implicitly challenge the credentials of Newtonian science itself, the very pride of the Enlightenment. The question implicitly raised by Hume’s powerful skeptical arguments is whether any epistemological authority at all can withstand critical scrutiny. The Enlightenment begins by unleashing skepticism in attacking limited, circumscribed targets, but once the skeptical genie is out of the bottle, it becomes difficult to maintain conviction in any authority. Thus, the despairing attitude that Hume famously expresses in the conclusion to Book One of the Treatise , as the consequence of his epistemological inquiry, while it clashes with the self-confident and optimistic attitude we associate with the Enlightenment, in fact reflects an essential possibility in a distinctive Enlightenment problematic regarding authority in belief.

Though Hume finds himself struggling with skepticism in the conclusion of Book One of the Treatise , the project of the work as he outlines it is not to advance a skeptical viewpoint, but to establish a science of the mind. Hume is one of many Enlightenment thinkers who aspire to be the “Newton of the mind”; he aspires to establish the basic laws that govern the elements of the human mind in its operations. Alexander Pope’s famous couplet in An Essay on Man (1733) (“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/ The proper study of mankind is man”) expresses well the intense interest humanity gains in itself within the context of the Enlightenment, as a partial substitute for its traditional interest in God and the transcendent domain. Just as the sun replaces the earth as the center of our cosmos in Copernicus’ cosmological system, so humanity itself replaces God at the center of humanity’s consciousness in the Enlightenment. Given the Enlightenment’s passion for science, the self-directed attention naturally takes the form of the rise of the scientific study of humanity in the period.

The enthusiasm for the scientific study of humanity in the period incorporates a tension or paradox concerning the place of humanity in the cosmos, as the cosmos is re-conceived in the context of Enlightenment philosophy and science. Newton’s success early in the Enlightenment of subsuming the phenomena of nature under universal laws of motion, expressed in simple mathematical formulae, encourages the conception of nature as a very complicated machine, whose parts are material and whose motions and properties are fully accounted for by deterministic causal laws. But if our conception of nature is of an exclusively material domain governed by deterministic, mechanical laws, and if we at the same time deny the place of the supernatural in the cosmos, then how does humanity itself fit into the cosmos? On the one hand, the achievements of the natural sciences in general are the great pride of the Enlightenment, manifesting the excellence of distinctively human capacities. The pride and self-assertiveness of humanity in the Enlightenment expresses itself, among other ways, in humanity’s making the study of itself its central concern. On the other hand, the study of humanity in the Enlightenment typically yields a portrait of us that is the opposite of flattering or elevating. Instead of being represented as occupying a privileged place in nature, as made in the image of God, humanity is represented typically in the Enlightenment as a fully natural creature, devoid of free will, of an immortal soul, and of a non-natural faculty of intelligence or reason. The very title of J.O. de La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1748), for example, seems designed to deflate humanity’s self-conception, and in this respect it is characteristic of the Enlightenment “science of man”. It is true of a number of works of the Enlightenment, perhaps especially works in the more radical French Enlightenment – notable here are Helvétius’s Of the Spirit (1758) and Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature (1770) – that they at once express the remarkable self-assertiveness of humanity characteristic of the Enlightenment in their scientific aspirations while at the same time painting a portrait of humanity that dramatically deflates its traditional self-image as occupying a privileged position in nature.

The methodology of epistemology in the period reflects a similar tension. Given the epistemological role of Descartes’ famous “ cogito, ergo sum ” in his system of knowledge, one might see Descartes’ epistemology as already marking the transition from an epistemology privileging knowledge of God to one that privileges self-knowledge instead. However, in Descartes’ epistemology, it remains true that knowledge of God serves as the necessary foundation for all human knowledge. Hume’s Treatise displays such a re-orientation less ambiguously. As noted, Hume means his work to comprise a science of the mind or of man. In the Introduction, Hume describes the science of man as effectively a foundation for all the sciences since all sciences “lie under the cognizance of men, and are judged of by their powers and faculties.” In other words, since all science is human knowledge, scientific knowledge of humanity is the foundation of the sciences. Hume’s placing the science of man at the foundation of all the sciences both exemplifies the privilege afforded to “mankind’s study of man” within the Enlightenment and provides an interpretation of it. But Hume’s methodological privileging of humanity in the system of sciences contrasts sharply with what he says in the body of his science about humanity. In Hume’s science of man, reason as a faculty of knowledge is skeptically attacked and marginalized; reason is attributed to other animals as well; belief is shown to be grounded in custom and habit; and free will is denied. So, even as knowledge of humanity supplants knowledge of God as the keystone of the system of knowledge, the scientific perspective on humanity starkly challenges humankind’s self-conception as occupying a privileged position in the order of nature.

Immanuel Kant explicitly enacts a revolution in epistemology modeled on the Copernican in astronomy. As characteristic of Enlightenment epistemology, Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781, second edition 1787) undertakes both to determine the limits of our knowledge, and at the same time to provide a foundation of scientific knowledge of nature, and he attempts to do this by examining our human faculties of knowledge critically. Even as he draws strict limits to rational knowledge, he attempts to defend reason as a faculty of knowledge, as playing a necessary role in natural science, in the face of skeptical challenges that reason faces in the period. According to Kant, scientific knowledge of nature is not merely knowledge of what in fact happens in nature, but knowledge of the causal laws of nature according to which what in fact happens must happen. But how is knowledge of necessary causal connection in nature possible? Hume’s investigation of the idea of cause had made clear that we cannot know causal necessity through experience; experience teaches us at most what in fact happens, not what must happen. In addition, Kant’s own earlier critique of principles of rationalism had convinced him that the principles of (“general”) logic also cannot justify knowledge of real necessary connections (in nature); the formal principle of non-contradiction can ground at best the deduction of one proposition from another, but not the claim that one property or event must follow from another in the course of nature. The generalized epistemological problem Kant addresses in the Critique of Pure Reason is: how is science possible (including natural science, mathematics, metaphysics), given that all such knowledge must be (or include) knowledge of real, substantive (not merely logical or formal) necessities. Put in the terms Kant defines, the problem is: how is synthetic, a priori knowledge possible?

According to Kant’s Copernican Revolution in epistemology addressed to this problem, objects must conform themselves to human knowledge rather than knowledge to objects. Certain cognitive forms lie ready in the human mind – prominent examples are the pure concepts of substance and cause and the forms of intuition, space and time; given sensible representations must conform themselves to these forms in order for human experience (as empirical knowledge of nature) to be possible at all. We can acquire scientific knowledge of nature because we constitute it a priori according to certain cognitive forms; for example, we can know nature as a causally ordered domain because we originally synthesize a priori the given manifold of sensibility according to the category of causality, which has its source in the human mind.

Kant saves rational knowledge of nature by limiting rational knowledge to nature. According to Kant’s argument, we can have rational knowledge only of the domain of possible experience, not of supersensible objects such as God and the soul. Moreover Kant’s solution brings with it a kind of idealism: given the mind’s role in constituting objects of experience, we know objects only as appearances , only as they appear according to our faculties, not as they are in themselves. This is the subjectivism of Kant’s epistemology. Kant’s epistemology exemplifies Enlightenment thought by replacing the theocentric conception of knowledge of the rationalist tradition with an anthropocentric conception.

However, Kant means his system to make room for humanity’s practical and religious aspirations toward the transcendent as well. According to Kant’s idealism, the realm of nature is limited to a realm of appearances, and we can intelligibly think supersensible objects such as God, freedom and the soul, though we cannot know them. Through the postulation of a realm of unknowable noumena (things in themselves) over against the realm of nature as a realm of appearances, Kant manages to make place for practical concepts that are central to our understanding of ourselves even while grounding our scientific knowledge of nature as a domain governed by deterministic causal laws. Though Kant’s idealism is highly controversial from its initial publication, a main point in its favor, according to Kant himself, is that it reconciles, in a single coherent tension, the main tension between the Enlightenment’s conception of nature, as ordered according to deterministic causal laws, and the Enlightenment’s conception of ourselves, as morally free, as having dignity, and as perfectible.

The commitment to careful observation and description of phenomena as the starting point of science, and then the success at explaining and accounting for observed phenomena through the method of induction, naturally leads to the development of new sciences for new domains in the Enlightenment. Many of the human and social sciences have their origins in the eighteenth century (e.g., history, anthropology, aesthetics, psychology, economics, even sociology), though most are only formally established as autonomous disciplines later. The emergence of new sciences is aided by the development of new scientific tools, such as models for probabilistic reasoning, a kind of reasoning that gains new respect and application in the period. Despite the multiplication of sciences in the period, the ideal remains to comprehend the diversity of our scientific knowledge as a unified system of science; however, this ideal of unity is generally taken as regulative, as an ideal to emerge in the ever-receding end-state of science, rather than as enforced from the beginning by regimenting science under a priori principles.

As exemplifying these and other tendencies of the Enlightenment, one work deserves special mention: the Encyclopedia , edited by Denis Diderot and Jean La Rond d’Alembert. The Encyclopedia (subtitled: “ systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts ”) was published in 28 volumes (17 of text, 11 of plates) over 21 years (1751–1772), and consists of over 70,000 articles, contributed by over 140 contributors, among them many of the luminaries of the French Enlightenment. The work aims to provide a compendium of existing human knowledge to be transmitted to subsequent generations, a transmission intended to contribute to the progress and dissemination of human knowledge and to a positive transformation of human society. The orientation of the Encyclopedia is decidedly secular and implicitly anti-authoritarian. Accordingly, the French state of the ancien régime censors the project, and it is completed only through the persistence of Diderot. The collaborative nature of the project, especially in the context of state opposition, contributes significantly to the formation of a shared sense of purpose among the wide variety of intellectuals who belong to the French Enlightenment. The knowledge contained in the Encyclopedia is self-consciously social both in its production – insofar as it is immediately the product of what the title page calls “a society of men of letters” – and in its address – insofar as it is primarily meant as an instrument for the education and improvement of society. It is a striking feature of the Encyclopedia , and one by virtue of which it exemplifies the Baconian conception of science characteristic of the period, that its entries cover the whole range and scope of knowledge, from the most abstract theoretical to the most practical, mechanical and technical.

2. The Good: Political Theory, Ethical Theory and Religion in the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is most identified with its political accomplishments. The era is marked by three political revolutions, which together lay the basis for modern, republican, constitutional democracies: The English Revolution (1688), the American Revolution (1775–83), and the French Revolution (1789–99). The success at explaining and understanding the natural world encourages the Enlightenment project of re-making the social/political world, in accord with the models we allegedly find in our reason. Enlightenment philosophers find that the existing social and political orders do not withstand critical scrutiny. Existing political and social authority is shrouded in religious myth and mystery and founded on obscure traditions. The criticism of existing institutions is supplemented with the positive work of constructing in theory the model of institutions as they ought to be. We owe to this period the basic model of government founded upon the consent of the governed; the articulation of the political ideals of freedom and equality and the theory of their institutional realization; the articulation of a list of basic individual human rights to be respected and realized by any legitimate political system; the articulation and promotion of toleration of religious diversity as a virtue to be respected in a well ordered society; the conception of the basic political powers as organized in a system of checks and balances; and other now-familiar features of western democracies. However, for all the enduring accomplishments of Enlightenment political philosophy, it is not clear that human reason proves powerful enough to put a concrete, positive authoritative ideal in place of the objects of its criticism. As in the epistemological domain, reason shows its power more convincingly in criticizing authorities than in establishing them. Here too the question of the limits of reason is one of the main philosophical legacies of the period. These limits are arguably vividly illustrated by the course of the French Revolution. The explicit ideals of the French Revolution are the Enlightenment ideals of individual freedom and equality; but, as the revolutionaries attempt to devise rational, secular institutions to put in place of those they have violently overthrown, eventually they have recourse to violence and terror in order to control and govern the people. The devolution of the French Revolution into the Reign of Terror is perceived by many as proving the emptiness and hypocrisy of Enlightenment reason, and is one of the main factors which account for the end of the Enlightenment as an historical period.

The political revolutions of the Enlightenment, especially the French and the American, were informed and guided to a significant extent by prior political philosophy in the period. Though Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan (1651), defends the absolute power of the political sovereign, and is to that extent opposed to the revolutionaries and reformers in England, this work is a founding work of Enlightenment political theory. Hobbes’ work originates the modern social contract theory, which incorporates Enlightenment conceptions of the relation of the individual to the state. According to the general social contract model, political authority is grounded in an agreement (often understood as ideal, rather than real) among individuals, each of whom aims in this agreement to advance his rational self-interest by establishing a common political authority over all. Thus, according to the general contract model (though this is more clear in later contract theorists such as Locke and Rousseau than in Hobbes himself), political authority is grounded not in conquest, natural or divinely instituted hierarchy, or in obscure myths and traditions, but rather in the rational consent of the governed. In initiating this model, Hobbes takes a naturalistic, scientific approach to the question of how political society ought to be organized (against the background of a clear-eyed, unsentimental conception of human nature), and thus decisively influences the Enlightenment process of secularization and rationalization in political and social philosophy.

Baruch Spinoza also greatly contributes to the development of Enlightenment political philosophy in its early years. The metaphysical doctrines of the Ethics (1677) lay the groundwork for his influence on the age. Spinoza’s arguments against Cartesian dualism and in favor of substance monism, the claim in particular that there can only be one substance, God or nature, was taken to have radical implications in the domains of politics, ethics and religion throughout the period. Spinoza’s employment of philosophical reason leads to the denial of the existence of a transcendent, creator, providential, law-giving God; this establishes the opposition between the teachings of philosophy, on the one hand, and the traditional orienting practical beliefs (moral, religious, political) of the people, on the other hand, an opposition that is one important aspect of the culture of the Enlightenment. In his main political work, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1677), Spinoza, building on his rationalist naturalism, opposes superstition, argues for toleration and the subordination of religion to the state, and pronounces in favor of qualified democracy. Liberalism is perhaps the most characteristic political philosophy of the Enlightenment, and Spinoza, in this text primarily, is one of its originators.

However, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690) is the classical source of modern liberal political theory. In his First Treatise of Government , Locke attacks Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680), which epitomizes the sort of political theory the Enlightenment opposes. Filmer defends the right of kings to exercise absolute authority over their subjects on the basis of the claim that they inherit the authority God vested in Adam at creation. Though Locke’s assertion of the natural freedom and equality of human beings in the Second Treatise is starkly and explicitly opposed to Filmer’s view, it is striking that the cosmology underlying Locke’s assertions is closer to Filmer’s than to Spinoza’s. According to Locke, in order to understand the nature and source of legitimate political authority, we have to understand our relations in the state of nature. Drawing upon the natural law tradition, Locke argues that it is evident to our natural reason that we are all absolutely subject to our Lord and Creator, but that, in relation to each other, we exist naturally in a state of equality “wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another” ( Second Treatise , §4). We also exist naturally in a condition of freedom, insofar as we may do with ourselves and our possessions as we please, within the constraints of the fundamental law of nature. The law of nature “teaches all mankind … that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions” (§6). That we are governed in our natural condition by such a substantive moral law, legislated by God and known to us through our natural reason, implies that the state of nature is not Hobbes’ war of all against all. However, since there is lacking any human authority over all to judge of disputes and enforce the law, it is a condition marred by “inconveniencies”, in which possession of natural freedom, equality and possessions is insecure. According to Locke, we rationally quit this natural condition by contracting together to set over ourselves a political authority, charged with promulgating and enforcing a single, clear set of laws, for the sake of guaranteeing our natural rights, liberties and possessions. The civil, political law, founded ultimately upon the consent of the governed, does not cancel the natural law, according to Locke, but merely serves to draw that law closer. “[T]he law of nature stands as an eternal rule to all men” (§135). Consequently, when established political power violates that law, the people are justified in overthrowing it. Locke’s argument for the right to revolt against a government that opposes the purposes for which legitimate government is taken by some to justify the political revolution in the context of which he writes (the English revolution) and, almost a hundred years later, by others to justify the American revolution as well.

Though Locke’s liberalism has been tremendously influential, his political theory is founded on doctrines of natural law and religion that are not nearly as evident as Locke assumes. Locke’s reliance on the natural law tradition is typical of Enlightenment political and moral theory. According to the natural law tradition, as the Enlightenment makes use of it, we can know through the use of our unaided reason that we all – all human beings, universally – stand in particular moral relations to each other. The claim that we can apprehend through our unaided reason a universal moral order exactly because moral qualities and relations (in particular human freedom and equality) belong to the nature of things, is attractive in the Enlightenment for obvious reasons. However, as noted above, the scientific apprehension of nature in the period does not support, and in fact opposes, the claim that the alleged moral qualities and relations (or, indeed, that any moral qualities and relations) are natural . According to a common Enlightenment assumption, as humankind clarifies the laws of nature through the advance of natural science and philosophy, the true moral and political order will be revealed with it. This view is expressed explicitly by the philosophe Marquis de Condorcet, in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (published posthumously in 1795 and which, perhaps better than any other work, lays out the paradigmatically Enlightenment view of history of the human race as a continual progress to perfection). But, in fact, advance in knowledge of the laws of nature in the science of the period does not help with discernment of a natural political or moral order. This asserted relationship between natural scientific knowledge and the political and moral order is under great stress already in the Enlightenment. With respect to Lockean liberalism, though his assertion of the moral and political claims (natural freedom, equality, et cetera) continues to have considerable force for us, the grounding of these claims in a religious cosmology does not. The question of how to ground our claims to natural freedom and equality is one of the main philosophical legacies of the Enlightenment.

The rise and development of liberalism in Enlightenment political thought has many relations with the rise of the mercantile class (the bourgeoisie) and the development of what comes to be called “civil society”, the society characterized by work and trade in pursuit of private property. Locke’s Second Treatise contributes greatly to the project of articulating a political philosophy to serve the interests and values of this ascending class. Locke claims that the end or purpose of political society is the preservation and protection of property (though he defines property broadly to include not only external property but life and liberties as well). According to Locke’s famous account, persons acquire rightful ownership in external things that are originally given to us all by God as a common inheritance, independently of the state and prior to its involvement, insofar as we “mix our labor with them”. The civil freedom that Locke defines, as something protected by the force of political laws, comes increasingly to be interpreted as the freedom to trade, to exchange without the interference of governmental regulation. Within the context of the Enlightenment, economic freedom is a salient interpretation of the individual freedom highly valued in the period. Adam Smith, a prominent member of the Scottish Enlightenment, describes in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) some of the laws of civil society, as a sphere distinct from political society as such, and thus contributes significantly to the founding of political economy (later called merely “economics”). His is one of many voices in the Enlightenment advocating for free trade and for minimal government regulation of markets. The trading house floor, in which people of various nationalities, languages, cultures, religions come together and trade, each in pursuit of his own self-interest, but, through this pursuit, supplying the wants of their respective nations and increasing its wealth, represents for some Enlightenment thinkers the benign, peaceful, universal rational order that they wish to see replace the violent, confessional strife that characterized the then-recent past of Europe.

However, the liberal conception of the government as properly protecting economic freedom of citizens and private property comes into conflict in the Enlightenment with the value of democracy. James Madison confronts this tension in the context of arguing for the adoption of the U.S. Constitution (in his Federalist #10). Madison argues that popular government (pure democracy) is subject to the evil of factions; in a pure democracy, a majority bound together by a private interest, relative to the whole, has the capacity to impose its particular will on the whole. The example most on Madison’s mind is that those without property (the many) may seek to bring about governmental re-distribution of the property of the propertied class (the few), perhaps in the name of that other Enlightenment ideal, equality. If, as in Locke’s theory, the government’s protection of an individual’s freedom is encompassed within the general end of protecting a person’s property, then, as Madison argues, the proper form of the government cannot be pure democracy, and the will of the people must be officially determined in some other way than by directly polling the people.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s political theory, as presented in his On the Social Contract (1762), presents a contrast to the Lockean liberal model. Though commitment to the political ideals of freedom and equality constitutes a common ground for Enlightenment political philosophy, it is not clear not only how these values have a home in nature as Enlightenment science re-conceives it, but also how concretely to interpret each of these ideals and how properly to balance them against each other. Contrary to Madison, Rousseau argues that direct (pure) democracy is the only form of government in which human freedom can be realized. Human freedom, according to Rousseau’s interpretation, is possible only through governance according to what he calls “the general will,” which is the will of the body politic, formed through the original contract, concretely determined in an assembly in which all citizens participate. Rousseau’s account intends to avert the evils of factions by structural elements of the original contract. The contract consists in the self-alienation by each associate of all rights and possessions to the body politic. Because each alienates all, each is an equal member of the body politic, and the terms and conditions are the same for all. The emergence of factions is avoided insofar as the good of each citizen is, and is understood to be, equally (because wholly) dependent on the general will. Legislation supports this identification with the general will by preserving the original equality established in the contract, prominently through maintaining a measure of economic equality. Rousseau’s account of the ideal relation of the individual citizen to the state differs from Locke’s; in Rousseau’s account, the individual must be actively engaged in political life in order to maintain the identification of his supremely authoritative will with the general will, whereas in Locke the emphasis is on the limits of governmental authority with respect to the expressions of the individual will. Though Locke’s liberal model is more representative of the Enlightenment in general, Rousseau’s political theory, which in some respects presents a revived classical model modified within the context of Enlightenment values, in effect poses many of the enduring questions regarding the meaning and interpretation of political freedom and equality within the modern state.

Both Madison and Rousseau, like most political thinkers of the period, are influenced by Baron de Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748), which is one of the founding texts of modern political theory. Though Montesquieu’s treatise belongs to the tradition of liberalism in political theory, given his scientific approach to social, legal and political systems, his influence extends beyond this tradition. Montesquieu argues that the system of legislation for a people varies appropriately with the particular circumstances of the people. He provides specific analysis of how climate, fertility of the soil, population size, et cetera, affect legislation. He famously distinguishes three main forms of governments: republics (which can either be democratic or aristocratic), monarchies and despotisms. He describes leading characteristics of each. His argument that functional democracies require the population to possess civic virtue in high measure, a virtue that consists in valuing public good above private interest, influences later Enlightenment theorists, including both Rousseau and Madison. He describes the threat of factions to which Madison and Rousseau respond in different (indeed opposite) ways. He provides the basic structure and justification for the balance of political powers that Madison later incorporates into the U.S. Constitution.

It is striking how unenlightened many of the Enlightenment’s celebrated thinkers are concerning issues of race and of gender (regarding race, see Race and Enlightenment: A Reader , edited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze). For all the public concern with the allegedly universal “rights of man” in the Enlightenment, the rights of women and of non-white people are generally overlooked in the period. (Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is a noteworthy exception.) When Enlightenment thinkers do turn their attention to the social standing of women or of non-white people, they tend to spout unreasoned prejudice. Moreover, while the philosophies of the Enlightenment generally aspire or pretend to universal truth, unattached to particular time, place or culture, Enlightenment writings are rife with rank ethno- and Eurocentrism, often explicit.

In the face of such tensions within the Enlightenment, one response is to affirm the power of the Enlightenment to improve humanity and society long beyond the end of the eighteenth century, indeed, down to the present day and into the future. This response embraces the Enlightenment and interprets more recent emancipation movements and achievement of recognition of the rights and dignity of traditionally oppressed and marginalized groups as expressions of Enlightenment ideals and aspirations. Critics of the Enlightenment respond differently to such tensions. Critics see them as symptoms of disorder, ideology, perversity, futility or falsehood that afflict the very core of the Enlightenment itself. (See James Schmidt’s “What Enlightenment Project?” for discussion of critics of the Enlightenment.) Famously, Adorno and Horkheimer interpret Nazi death camps as the result of “the dialectic of the Enlightenment”, as what historically becomes of the supremacy of instrumental reason asserted in the Enlightenment. As another example, we may point to some post-modern feminists, who argue, in opposition to the liberal feminists who embrace broadly Enlightenment ideals and conceptions, that the essentialism and universalism associated with Enlightenment ideals are both false and intrinsically hostile to the aspirations to self-realization of women and of other traditionally oppressed groups. (See Strickland and the essays in Akkerman and Stuurman.) This entry is not the place to delineate strains of opposition to the Enlightenment, but it is worth noting that post-Enlightenment social and political struggles to achieve equality or recognition for traditionally marginalized or oppressed groups are sometimes self-consciously grounded in the Enlightenment and sometimes marked by explicit opposition to the Enlightenment’s conceptions or presuppositions.

Many of the leading issues and positions of contemporary philosophical ethics take shape within the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment in the West, ethical reflection begins from and orients itself around religious doctrines concerning God and the afterlife. The highest good of humanity, and, accordingly, the content and grounding of moral duties, are conceived in immediately religious terms. During the Enlightenment, this changes, certainly within philosophy, but to some significant degree, within the population of western society at large. As the processes of industrialization, urbanization, and dissemination of education advance in this period, happiness in this life, rather than union with God in the next, becomes the highest end for more and more people. Also, the violent religious wars that bloody Europe in the early modern period motivate the development of secular, this-worldly ethics, insofar as they indicate the failure of religious doctrines concerning God and the afterlife to establish a stable foundation for ethics. In the Enlightenment, philosophical thinkers confront the problem of developing ethical systems on a secular, broadly naturalistic basis for the first time since the rise of Christianity eclipsed the great classical ethical systems. However, the changes in our understanding of nature and cosmology, effected by modern natural science, make recourse to the systems of Plato and Aristotle problematic. The Platonic identification of the good with the real and the Aristotelian teleological understanding of natural things are both difficult to square with the Enlightenment conception of nature. The general philosophical problem emerges in the Enlightenment of how to understand the source and grounding of ethical duties, and how to conceive the highest good for human beings, within a secular, broadly naturalistic context, and within the context of a transformed understanding of the natural world.

In ethical thought, as in political theory, Hobbes’ thought is an important provocation in the Enlightenment. Hobbes understands what is good, as the end of human action, to be “whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire,” and evil to be “the object of his hate, and aversion,” “there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves” ( Leviathan , chapter 6). Hobbes’ conception of human beings as fundamentally motivated by their perception of what is in their own best interest implies the challenge, important for Enlightenment moral philosophy, to construct moral duties of justice and benevolence out of such limited materials. The basis of human action that Hobbes posits is immediately intelligible and even shared with other animals to some extent; a set of moral duties constructed on this basis would also be intelligible, de-mystified, and fit within the larger scheme of nature. Bernard Mandeville is sometimes grouped with Hobbes in the Enlightenment, especially by critics of them both, because he too, in his popular Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714), sees people as fundamentally motivated by their perceived self-interest, and then undertakes to tell a story about how moral virtue, which involves conquering one’s own appetite and serving the interests of others, can be understood to arise on this basis.

Samuel Clarke, an influential rationalist British thinker early in the Enlightenment, undertakes to show in his Discourse concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion (1706), against Hobbes, that the absolute difference between moral good and moral evil lies in the immediately discernible nature of things, independently of any compacts or positive legislation by God or human beings. Clarke writes that “in men’s dealing … one with another, it is undeniably more fit, absolutely and in the nature of the thing itself, that all men should endeavor to promote the universal good and welfare of all; than that all men should be continually contriving the ruin and destruction of all”. Likewise for the rest of what morality enjoins upon us. According to Clarke, that some actions (those we call morally good or required) are “fit to be done” and others not fit is grounded upon the immediately evident relations in which things stand to each other in nature, just as “the proportions of lines or numbers” are evident to the rational perception of a reasonable being. Similarly, Christian Wolff’s rationalist practical philosophy also grounds moral duties in an objective rational order. However, the objective quality on which moral requirements are grounded for Wolff is not the “fitness” of things to be done but rather their perfection. Wolff counts as a founder of the Aufklärung in part because of his attempted derivation of ethical duties from an order of perfection in things, discernable through reason, independently of divine commands.

Rationalist ethics so conceived faces the following obstacles in the Enlightenment. First, as implied above, it becomes increasingly implausible that the objective, mind-independent order is really as rationalist ethicists claim it to be. Second, even if the objective realm were ordered as the rationalist claims, it remains unclear how this order gives rise (on its own, as it were) to obligations binding on our wills. David Hume famously exposes the fallacy of deriving a prescriptive statement (that one ought to perform some action) from a description of how things stand in relation to each other in nature. Prima facie, there is a gap between the rationalist’s objective order and a set of prescriptions binding on our wills; if a supreme legislator must be re-introduced in order to make the conformity of our actions to that objective order binding on our wills, then the alleged existence of the objective moral order does not do the work the account asks of it in the first place.

Alongside the rationalist strand of ethical philosophy in the Enlightenment, there is also a very significant empiricist strand. Empirical accounts of moral virtue in the period are distinguished, both by grounding moral virtue on an empirical study of human nature, and by grounding cognition of moral duties and moral motivation in human sensibility, rather than in reason. The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, author of the influential work Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), is a founding figure of the empiricist strand. Shaftesbury, like Clarke, is provoked by Hobbes’ egoism to provide a non-egoistic account of moral virtue. Shaftesbury conceives the core notion of the goodness of things teleologically: something is good if it contributes to the well-being or furtherance of the system of which it is a part. Individual animals are members of species, and therefore they are good as such insofar as they contribute to the well-being of the species of which they are a part. Thus, the good of things, including human beings, for Shaftesbury as for Clarke, is an objective quality that is knowable through reason. However, though we can know what is good through reason, Shaftesbury maintains that reason alone is not sufficient to motivate human action. Shaftesbury articulates the structure of a distinctively human moral sensibility. Moral sensibility depends on the faculty of reflection. When we reflect on first-order passions such as gratitude, kindness and pity, we find ourselves approving or liking them and disapproving or disliking their opposites. By virtue of our receptivity to such feelings, we are capable of virtue and have a sense of right and wrong. In this way, Shaftesbury defines the moral sense that plays a significant role in the theories of subsequent Enlightenment thinkers such as Francis Hutcheson and David Hume.

In the rationalist tradition, the conflict within the breast of the person between the requirements of morality and self-interest is canonically a conflict between the person’s reason and her passions. Shaftesbury’s identification of a moral sentiment in the nature of humanity renders this a conflict within sensibility itself, a conflict between different sentiments, between a self-interested sentiment and an unegoistic sentiment. Though both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, no less than Clarke, oppose Hobbes’s egoism, it is nonetheless true that the doctrine of moral sensibility softens moral demands, so to speak. Doing what is morally right or morally good is intrinsically bound up with a distinctive kind of pleasure on their accounts. It is significant that both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, the two founders of modern moral sense theory, articulate their ethical theory in conjunction with an aesthetic theory. Arguably the pleasure we feel in the apprehension of something beautiful is disinterested pleasure . Our susceptibility to aesthetic pleasure can be taken to reveal that we apprehend and respond to objective (or, anyway, universal) values, not only or necessarily on the basis of reason, but through our natural sensibility instead. Thus, aesthetics, as Shaftesbury and Hutcheson independently develop an account of it, gives encouragement to their doctrines of moral sensibility. But an account of moral virtue, unlike aesthetics, requires an account of moral motivation . As noted above, both Shaftesbury and Hutcheson want to do justice to the idea that proper moral motivation is not the pursuit of pleasure, even disinterested pleasure, but rather an immediate response to the perception of moral value. The problem of giving a satisfying account of moral motivation is a difficult one for empiricist moral philosophers in the Enlightenment.

While for Shaftesbury, at the beginning of the moral sense tradition, moral sense tracks a mind-independent order of value, David Hume, motivated in part by a more radical empiricism, is happy to let the objective order go. We have no access through reason to an independent order of value which moral sense would track. For Hume, morality is founded completely on our sentiments. Hume is often regarded as the main originator of so-called “ethical subjectivism”, according to which moral judgments or evaluations (regarding actions or character) do not make claims about independent facts but merely express the subject’s feelings or attitudes with respect to actions or character. Such subjectivism is relieved of the difficult task of explaining how the objective order of values belongs to the natural world as it is being reconceived by natural science in the period; however, it faces the challenge of explaining how error and disagreement in moral judgments and evaluations are possible. Hume’s account of the standards of moral judgment follows that of Hutcheson in relying centrally on the “natural” responses of an ideal observer or spectator.

Hume’s ethics is exemplary of philosophical ethics in the Enlightenment by virtue of its belonging to the attempt to provide a new, empirically grounded science of human nature, free of theological presuppositions. As noted above, the attempts by the members of the French Enlightenment to present a new understanding of human nature are strongly influenced by Locke’s “sensationalism”, which, radicalized by Condillac, amounts to the attempt to base all contents and faculties of the human mind on the senses. Typically, the French philosophes draw more radical or iconoclastic implications from the new “science of man” than English or Scottish Enlightenment figures. Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771) is typical here. In De l’ésprit (1758), Helvétius follows the Lockean sensationalism of Condillac and pairs it with the claim that human beings are motivated in their actions only by the natural desire to maximize their own pleasure and minimize their pain. De l’ésprit , though widely read, gives rise to strong negative reactions in the time, both by political and religious authorities (the Sorbonne, the Pope and the Parlement of Paris all condemn the book) and by prominent fellow philosophes , in great part because Helvétius’s psychology seems to critics to render moral imperatives and values without basis, despite his best attempts to derive them. Helvétius attempts to ground the moral equality of all human beings by portraying all human beings, whatever their standing in the social hierarchy, whatever their special talents and gifts, as equally products of the nature we share plus the variable influences of education and social environment. But, to critics, Helvétius’s account portrays all human beings as equal only by virtue of portraying all as equally worthless (insofar as the claim to equality is grounded on all being equally determined by external factors). However, Helvétius’s ideas, in De l’ésprit as well as in its posthumously published sequel De l’homme (1772), exert a great deal of influence, especially his case for the role of pleasure and pain in human motivation and the role of education and social incentives in shaping individuals into contributors to the social good. Helvétius is sometimes regarded as the father of modern utilitarianism through his articulation of the greatest happiness principle and through his influence on Bentham.

Helvétius is typical in the respect that he is radical in the revisions he proposes, not in common moral judgments or customs of the time, but rather regarding the philosophical grounding of those judgments and customs. But there are some philosophers in the Enlightenment who are radical in the revisions they propose regarding the content of ethical judgments themselves. The Marquis de Sade is merely the most notorious example, among a set of Enlightenment figures (including also the Marquis de Argens and Diderot himself in some of his writings) who, within the context of the new naturalism and its emphasis on the pursuit of pleasure, celebrate the avid pursuit of sexual pleasure and explicitly challenge the sexual mores, as well as the wider morality, of their time. The more or less fictionalized, philosophically self-conscious “libertine” is one significant expression of Enlightenment ethical thought.

If the French Enlightenment tends to advance this-worldly happiness as the highest good for human beings more insistently than the Enlightenment elsewhere, then Rousseau’s voice is, in this as in other respects, a discordant voice in that context. Rousseau advances the cultivation and realization of human freedom as the highest end for human beings and thereby gives expression to another side of Enlightenment ethics. As Rousseau describes it, the capacity for individual self-determination puts us in a problematic relation to our natural desires and inclinations and to the realm of nature generally, insofar as that realm is constituted by mechanistic causation. Though Rousseau places a great deal of emphasis on human freedom, and makes significant contributions to our understanding of ourselves as free, he does not address very seriously the problem of the place of human freedom in the cosmos as it is conceived within the context of Enlightenment naturalism.

However, Rousseau’s writings help Kant to the articulation of a practical philosophy that addresses many of the tensions in the Enlightenment. Kant follows Rousseau, and disagrees with empiricism in ethics in the period, in emphasizing human freedom, rather than human happiness, as the central orienting concept of practical philosophy. Though Kant presents the moral principle as a principle of practical reason, his ethics also disagrees significantly with rationalist ethics in the period. According to Kant, rationalists such as Wolff, insofar as they take moral prescriptions to follow from an end given to the will (in Wolff’s case, the end of perfection), do not understand us as autonomous in our moral activity. Through interpreting the faculty of the will itself as practical reason, Kant understands the moral principle as internally legislated, thus as not only compatible with freedom, but as equivalent to the principle of a free will, as a principle of autonomy. As noted above, rationalists in ethics in the period are challenged to explain how the objective moral order which reason in us allegedly discerns gives rise to valid prescriptions binding on our wills (the gap between is and ought ). For Kant, the moral order is not independent of our will, but rather represents the formal constraints of willing as such. Kant’s account thus both avoids the is-ought gap and interprets moral willing as expressive of our freedom.

Moreover, by virtue of his interpretation of the moral principle as the principle of pure practical reason, Kant is able to redeem the ordinary sense of moral requirements as over-riding, as potentially opposed to the claims of one’s happiness, and thus as different in kind from the deliverances of prudential reasoning. This ordinary sense of moral requirements is not easily accommodated within the context of Enlightenment empiricism and naturalism. Kant’s stark dichotomy between a person’s practical reason and her sensible nature is strongly criticized, both by the subsequent Romantic generation and in the contemporary context; but this dichotomy is bound up with an important benefit of Kant’s view – much promoted by Kant himself – within the context of the Enlightenment. Elaborated in the context of Kant’s idealism as a contrast between the “realm of freedom” and the “realm of nature”, the dichotomy enables Kant’s proposed solution to the conflict between freedom and nature that besets Enlightenment thought. As noted above, Kant argues that the application of the causal principle is restricted to the realm of nature, thus making room for freedom, compatibly with the causal determination of natural events required by scientific knowledge. Additionally, Kant attempts to show that morality “leads ineluctably to” religious belief (in the supersensible objects of God and of the immortal soul) while being essentially not founded on religious belief, thus again vindicating the ordinary understanding of morality while still furthering Enlightenment values and commitments.

Though the Enlightenment is sometimes represented as the enemy of religion, it is more accurate to see it as critically directed against various (arguably contingent) features of religion, such as superstition, enthusiasm, fanaticism and supernaturalism. Indeed the effort to discern and advocate for a religion purified of such features – a “rational” or “natural” religion – is more typical of the Enlightenment than opposition to religion as such. Even Voltaire, who is perhaps the most persistent, powerful, vocal Enlightenment critic of religion, directs his polemic mostly against the Catholic Church in France – “ l’infâme ” in his famous sign-off in his letters, “ Écrasez l’infâme ” (“Crush the infamous”) refers to the Church, not to religion as such. However, controversy regarding the truth-value or reasonableness of religious belief in general, Christian belief in particular, and controversy regarding the proper place of religion in society, occupies a particularly central place in the Enlightenment. It’s as if the terrible, violent confessional strife in the early modern period in Europe, the bloody drawn-out wars between the Christian sects, was removed to the intellectual arena in the Enlightenment and became a set of more general philosophical controversies.

Alongside the rise of the new science, the rise of Protestantism in western Christianity also plays an important role in generating the Enlightenment. The original Protestants assert a sort of individual liberty with respect to questions of faith against the paternalistic authority of the Church. The “liberty of conscience”, so important to Enlightenment thinkers in general, and asserted against all manner of paternalistic authorities (including Protestant), descends from this Protestant assertion. The original Protestant assertion initiates a crisis of authority regarding religious belief, a crisis of authority that, expanded and generalized and even, to some extent, secularized, becomes a central characteristic of the Enlightenment spirit. The original Protestant assertion against the Catholic Church bases itself upon the authority of scripture. However, in the Enlightenment, the authority of scripture is strongly challenged, especially when taken literally. Developing natural science renders acceptance of a literal version of the Bible increasingly untenable. But authors such as Spinoza (in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus ) present ways of interpreting scripture according to its spirit, rather than its letter, in order to preserve its authority and truth, thus contributing to the Enlightenment controversy of whether some rationally purified version of the religion handed down in the culture belongs to the true philosophical representation of the world or not; and, if so, what its content is.

It is convenient to discuss religion in the Enlightenment by presenting four characteristic forms of Enlightenment religion in turn: deism, religion of the heart, fideism and atheism.

Deism . Deism is the form of religion most associated with the Enlightenment. According to deism, we can know by the natural light of reason that the universe is created and governed by a supreme intelligence; however, although this supreme being has a plan for creation from the beginning, the being does not interfere with creation; the deist typically rejects miracles and reliance on special revelation as a source of religious doctrine and belief, in favor of the natural light of reason. Thus, a deist typically rejects the divinity of Christ, as repugnant to reason; the deist typically demotes the figure of Jesus from agent of miraculous redemption to extraordinary moral teacher. Deism is the form of religion fitted to the new discoveries in natural science, according to which the cosmos displays an intricate machine-like order; the deists suppose that the supposition of God is necessary as the source or author of this order. Though not a deist himself, Isaac Newton provides fuel for deism with his argument in his Opticks (1704) that we must infer from the order and beauty in the world to the existence of an intelligent supreme being as the cause of this order and beauty. Samuel Clarke, perhaps the most important proponent and popularizer of Newtonian philosophy in the early eighteenth century, supplies some of the more developed arguments for the position that the correct exercise of unaided human reason leads inevitably to the well-grounded belief in God. He argues that the Newtonian physical system implies the existence of a transcendent cause, the creator God. In his first set of Boyle lectures, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1705), Clarke presents the metaphysical or “argument a priori ” for God’s existence. This argument concludes from the rationalist principle that whatever exists must have a sufficient reason or cause of its existence to the existence of a transcendent, necessary being who stands as the cause of the chain of natural causes and effects. Clarke also supports the empirical argument from design, the argument that concludes from the evidence of order in nature to the existence of an intelligent author of that order. In his second set of Boyle lectures, A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion (1706), Clarke argues as well that the moral order revealed to us by our natural reason requires the existence of a divine legislator and an afterlife, in which the supreme being rewards virtue and punishes vice. In his Boyle lectures, Clarke argues directly against the deist philosophy and maintains that what he regards as the one true religion, Christianity, is known as such on the basis of miracles and special revelation; still, Clarke’s arguments on the topic of natural religion are some of the best and most widely-known arguments in the period for the general deist position that natural philosophy in a broad sense grounds central doctrines of a universal religion.

Enlightenment deism first arises in England. In On the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), Locke aims to establish the compatibility of reason and the teachings of Christianity. Though Locke himself is (like Newton, like Clarke) not a deist, the major English deists who follow (John Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious [1696]); Anthony Collins, A Discourse of Freethinking [1713]; Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation [1730]) are influenced by Locke’s work. Voltaire carries deism across the channel to France and advocates for it there over his long literary career. Toward the end-stage, the farcical stage, of the French Revolution, Robespierre institutes a form of deism, the so-called “Cult of the Supreme Being”, as the official religion of the French state. Deism plays a role in the founding of the American republic as well. Many of the founding fathers (Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Paine) author statements or tracts that are sympathetic to deism; and their deistic sympathies influence the place given (or not given) to religion in the new American state that they found.

Religion of the Heart . Opposition to deism derives sometimes from the perception of it as coldly rationalistic. The God of the deists, arrived at through a priori or empirical argument and referred to as the Prime Mover or Original Architect, is often perceived as distant and unconcerned with the daily struggles of human existence, and thus as not answering the human needs from which religion springs in the first place. Some important thinkers of the Enlightenment – notably Shaftesbury and Rousseau – present religion as founded on natural human sentiments, rather than on the operations of the intellect. Rousseau has his Savoyard Vicar declare, in his Profession of Faith in Emile (1762), that the idea of worshiping a beneficent deity arose in him initially as he reflected on his own situation in nature and his “heart began to glow with a sense of gratitude towards the author of our being”. The Savoyard Vicar continues: “I adore the supreme power, and melt into tenderness at his goodness. I have no need to be taught artificial forms of worship; the dictates of nature are sufficient. Is it not a natural consequence of self-love to honor those who protect us, and to love such as do us good?” This “natural” religion – opposed to the “artificial” religions enforced in the institutions – is often classed as a form of deism. But it deserves separate mention, because of its grounding in natural human sentiments, rather than in reason or in metaphysical or natural scientific problems of cosmology.

Fideism . Deism or natural religion of various sorts tends to rely on the claim that reason or human experience supports the hypothesis that there is a supreme being who created or authored the world. In one of the most important philosophical texts on natural religion to appear during the Enlightenment, David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (published posthumously in 1779), this supposition is criticized relentlessly, incisively and in detail. Naturally, the critical, questioning attitude characteristic of the Enlightenment in general is directed against the arguments on which natural religion is based. In Part Nine of the Dialogues, Samuel Clarke’s “argument a priori” (as defended by the character Demea) is dispatched fairly quickly, but with a battery of arguments. But Hume is mainly concerned in the Dialogues with the other major pillar of natural religion in the Enlightenment, the “empirical” argument, the teleological argument or the argument from design. Cleanthes, the character who advances the design argument in the dialogue, proceeds from the rule for empirical reasoning that like effects prove like causes. He reasons that, given the resemblance between nature, which displays in many respects a “curious adaptation of means to ends”, and a man-made machine, we must infer the cause of nature to be an intelligence like ours, though greater in proportion as nature surpasses in perfection the products of human intelligence. Philo, the skeptical voice in the Dialogues , presses Cleanthes’ argument on many fronts. He points out that the argument is only as strong as the similarity between nature or parts of nature and man-made machines, and further, that a close scrutiny reveals that analogy to be weak. Moreover, according to the principle of the argument, the stronger the evidence for an author (or authors) of nature, the more like us that author (or authors) should be taken to be. Consequently, according to Philo, the argument does not support the conclusion that God exists, taking God to be unitary, infinite, perfect, et cetera. Also, although the existence of evil and disorder in nature may serve actually to strengthen the case for the argument, given the disorder in human creations as well, the notion that God authors evil and disorder is disturbing. If one denies that there is disorder and evil in nature, however implausibly, the effect is to emphasize again the dissimilarity between nature and human products and thus weaken the central basis of the argument. With these and other considerations, Philo puts the proponent of the empirical argument in a difficult dialectical position. But Cleanthes is not moved. He holds the inference from the phenomenon of the curious adaptation of means to ends in nature to the existence of an intelligent and beneficent author to be so natural as to be impervious to the philosophical cavils raised by Philo. And, in the ambiguous conclusion of the work, Philo seems to agree. Though Hume himself seems to have been an atheist, one natural way to take the upshot of his Dialogues is that religious belief is so “natural” to us that rational criticism cannot unseat it. The ambiguous upshot of the work can be taken to be the impotence of rational criticism in the face of religious belief, rather than the illegitimacy of religious belief in the face of rational criticism. This tends toward fideism, the view according to which religious faith maintains its truth over against philosophical reasoning, which opposes but cannot defeat it. Fideism is most often associated with thinkers whose beliefs run contrary to the trends of the Enlightenment (Blaise Pascal, Johann-Georg Hamann, Søren Kierkegaard), but the skeptical strain in the Enlightenment, from Pierre Bayle through David Hume, expresses itself not only in atheism, but also in fideism.

Atheism . Atheism is more present in the French Enlightenment than elsewhere. In the writings of Denis Diderot, atheism is partly supported by an expansive, dynamic conception of nature. According to the viewpoint developed by Diderot, we ought to search for the principles of natural order within natural processes themselves, not in a supernatural being. Even if we don’t yet know the internal principles for the ordering and development of natural forms, the appeal to a transcendent author of such things is reminiscent, to Diderot’s ear, of the appeal to Aristotelian “substantial forms” that was expressly rejected at the beginning of modern science as explaining nothing. The appeal to a transcendent author does not extend our understanding, but merely marks and fixes the limits of it. Atheism (combined with materialism) in the French Enlightenment is perhaps most identified with the Baron d’Holbach, whose System of Nature (1770) generated a great deal of controversy at the time for urging the case for atheism explicitly and emphatically. D’Holbach’s system of nature is strongly influenced by Diderot’s writings, though it displays less subtlety and dialectical sophistication. Though most Enlightenment thinkers hold that morality requires religion, in the sense that morality requires belief in a transcendent law-giver and in an after-life, d’Holbach (influenced in this respect by Spinoza, among others) makes the case for an ethical naturalism, an ethics that is free of any reference to a supernatural grounding or aspiration. Like Helvétius before him, d’Holbach presents an ethics in which virtue consists in enlightened self-interest. The metaphysical background of the ethics he presents is deterministic materialism. The Prussian enlightened despot, Frederick the Great, famously criticizes d’Holbach’s book for exemplifying the incoherence that troubles the Enlightenment generally: while d’Holbach provides passionate moral critiques of existing religious and social and political institutions and practices, his own materialist, determinist conception of nature allows no place for moral “oughts” and prescriptions and values.

3. The Beautiful: Aesthetics in the Enlightenment

Modern systematic philosophical aesthetics not only first emerges in the context of the Enlightenment, but also flowers brilliantly there. As Ernst Cassirer notes, the eighteenth century not only thinks of itself as the “century of philosophy”, but also as “the age of criticism,” where criticism is centrally (though not only) art and literary criticism (Cassirer 1932, 255). Philosophical aesthetics flourishes in the period because of its strong affinities with the tendencies of the age. Alexander Baumgarten, the German philosopher in the school of Christian Wolff, founds systematic aesthetics in the period, in part through giving it its name. “Aesthetics” is derived from the Greek word for “senses”, because for Baumgarten a science of the beautiful would be a science of the sensible, a science of sensible cognition. The Enlightenment in general re-discovers the value of the senses, not only in cognition, but in human lives in general, and so, given the intimate connection between beauty and human sensibility, the Enlightenment is naturally particularly interested in aesthetics. Also, the Enlightenment includes a general recovery and affirmation of the value of pleasure in human lives, against the tradition of Christian asceticism, and the flourishing of the arts, of the criticism of the arts and of the philosophical theorizing about beauty, promotes and is promoted by this recovery and affirmation. The Enlightenment also enthusiastically embraces the discovery and disclosure of rational order in nature, as manifest most clearly in the development of the new science. It seems to many theorists in the Enlightenment that the faculty of taste, the faculty by which we discern beauty, reveals to us some part of this order, a distinctive harmony, unities amidst variety. Thus, in the phenomenon of aesthetic pleasure, human sensibility discloses to us rational order, thus binding together two enthusiasms of the Enlightenment.

In the early Enlightenment, especially in France, the emphasis is upon the discernment of an objective rational order, rather than upon the subject’s sensual aesthetic pleasure. Though Descartes’ philosophical system does not include a theory of taste or of beauty, his mathematical model of the physical universe inspires the aesthetics of French classicism. French classicism begins from the classical maxim that the beautiful is the true. Nicolas Boileau writes in his influential didactic poem, The Art of Poetry (1674), in which he lays down rules for good versification within different genres, that “Nothing is beautiful but the true, the true alone is lovable.” In the period the true is conceived of as an objective rational order. According to the classical conception of art that dominates in the period, art imitates nature, though not nature as given in disordered experience, but the ideal nature, the ideal in which we can discern and enjoy “unity in multiplicity.” In French classicism, aesthetics is very much under the influence of, and indeed modeled on, systematic, rigorous theoretical science of nature. Just as in Descartes’ model of science, where knowledge of all particulars depends on prior knowledge of the principle from which the particulars are deduced, so also in the aesthetics of French classicism, the demand is for systematization under a single, universal principle. The subjection of artistic phenomena to universal rules and principles is expressed, for example, in the title of Charles Batteaux’s main work, The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (1746), as well as in Boileau’s rules for good versification.

In Germany in the eighteenth century, Christian Wolff’s systematic rationalist metaphysics forms the basis for much of the reflection on aesthetics, though sometimes as a set of doctrines to be argued against. Wolff affirms the classical dictum that beauty is truth; beauty is truth perceived through the feeling of pleasure. Wolff understands beauty to consist in the perfection in things, which he understands in turn to consist in a harmony or order of a manifold. We judge something beautiful through a feeling of pleasure when we sense in it this harmony or perfection. Beauty is, for Wolff, the sensitive cognition of perfection. Thus, for Wolff, beauty corresponds to objective features of the world, but judgments of beauty are relative to us also, insofar as they are based on the human faculty of sensibility.

Though philosophical rationalism forms the basis of aesthetics in the early Enlightenment in France and Germany, thinkers in the empiricist tradition in England and Scotland introduce many of the salient themes of Enlightenment aesthetics. In particular, with the rise of empiricism and subjectivism in this domain, attention shifts to the ground and nature of the subject’s experience of beauty, the subject’s aesthetic response. Lord Shaftesbury, though not himself an empiricist or subjectivist in aesthetics, makes significant contributions to this development. Shaftesbury re-iterates the classical equation, “all beauty is truth,” but the truth that beauty is for Shaftesbury is not an objective rational order that could also be known conceptually. Though beauty is, for Shaftesbury, a kind of harmony that is independent of the human mind, under the influence of Plotinus, he understands the human being’s immediate intuition of the beautiful as a kind of participation in the original harmony. Shaftesbury focuses attention on the nature of the subject’s response to beauty, as elevating the person, also morally. He maintains that aesthetic response consists in a disinterested unegoistic pleasure; the discovery of this capacity for disinterested pleasure in harmony shows the way for the development of his ethics that has a similar grounding. And, in fact, in seeing aesthetic response as elevating oneself above self-interested pursuits, through cultivating one’s receptivity to disinterested pleasure, Shaftesbury ties tightly together aesthetics and ethics, morality and beauty, and in that respect also contributes to a trend of the period. Also, in placing the emphasis on the subject’s response to beauty, rather than on the objective characteristics of the beautiful, Shaftesbury makes aesthetics belong to the general Enlightenment interest in human nature. Thinkers of the period find in our receptivity to beauty a key both to understanding both distinctively human nature and its perfection.

Francis Hutcheson follows Shaftesbury in his emphasis on the subject’s aesthetic response, on the distinctive sort of pleasure that the beautiful elicits in us. Partly because the Neo-Platonic influence, so pronounced in Shaftesbury’s aesthetics, is washed out of Hutcheson’s, to be replaced by a more thorough-going empiricism, Hutcheson understands this distinctive aesthetic pleasure as more akin to a secondary quality. Thus, Hutcheson’s aesthetic work raises the prominent question whether “beauty” refers to something objective at all or whether beauty is “nothing more” than a human idea or experience. As in the domain of Enlightenment ethics, so with Enlightenment aesthetics too, the step from Shaftesbury to Hutcheson marks a step toward subjectivism. Hutcheson writes in one of his Two Treatises , his Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design (1725) that “the word ‘beauty’ is taken for the idea raised in us , and a sense of beauty for our power of receiving this idea ” (Section I, Article IX). However, though Hutcheson understands beauty to be an idea in us, he takes this idea to be “excited” or “occasioned” in us by distinctive objective qualities, in particular by objects that display “ uniformity amidst variety ” (ibid., Section II, Article III). In the very title of Hutcheson’s work above, we see the importance of the classical ideas of (rational) order and harmony in Hutcheson’s aesthetic theory, even as he sets the tenor for much Enlightenment discussion of aesthetics through placing the emphasis on the subjective idea and aesthetic response.

David Hume’s famous essay on “the standard of taste” raises and addresses the epistemological problem raised by subjectivism in aesthetics. If beauty is an idea in us, rather than a feature of objects independent of us, then how do we understand the possibility of correctness and incorrectness – how do we understand the possibility of standards of judgment – in this domain? The problem is posed more clearly for Hume because he intensifies Hutcheson’s subjectivism. He writes in the Treatise that “pleasure and pain….are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence” ( Treatise , Book II, part I, section viii). But if a judgment of taste is based on, or expresses, subjective sentiments, how can it be incorrect? In his response to this question, Hume accounts for the expectation of agreement in judgments of taste by appealing to the fact that we share a common human nature, and he accounts for ‘objectivity’ or expertise in judgments of taste, within the context of his subjectivism, by appealing to the normative responses of well-placed observers. Both of these points (the commonality of human nature and the securing of ‘objectivity’ in judgments based on sentiments by appeal to the normative responses of appropriately placed observers) are typical of the period more generally, and especially of the strong empiricist strain in the Enlightenment. Hume develops the empiricist line in aesthetics to the point where little remains of the classical emphasis on the order or harmony or truth that is, according to the French classicists, apprehended and appreciated in our aesthetic responses to the beautiful, and thus, according to the classicists, the ground of aesthetic responses.

Immanuel Kant faces squarely the problem of the normativity of judgments of taste. Influenced by Hutcheson and the British empiricist tradition in general, Kant understands judgments of taste to be founded on a distinctive sort of feeling, a disinterested pleasure. In taking judgments of taste to be subjective (they are founded on the subject’s feeling of pleasure) and non-cognitive (such judgments do not subsume representations under concepts and thus do not ascribe properties to objects), Kant breaks with the German rationalist school. However Kant continues to maintain that judgments of beauty are like cognitive judgments in making a legitimate claim to universal agreement – in contrast to judgments of the agreeable. The question is how to vindicate the legitimacy of this demand. Kant argues that the distinctive pleasure underlying judgments of taste is the experience of the harmony of the faculties of the imagination and the understanding, a harmony that arises through their “free play” in the process of cognizing objects on the basis of given sensible intuition. The harmony is “free” in an experience of beauty in the sense that it is not forced by rules of the understanding, as is the agreement among the faculties in acts of cognition. The order and harmony that we experience in the face of the beautiful is subjective, according to Kant; but it is at the same time universal and normative, by virtue of its relation to the conditions of human cognition.

The emphasis Kant places on the role of the activity of the imagination in aesthetic pleasure and discernment typifies a trend in Enlightenment thought. Whereas early in the Enlightenment, in French classicism, and to some extent in Christian Wolff and other figures of German rationalism, the emphasis is on the more-or-less static rational order and proportion and on rigid universal rules or laws of reason, the trend during the development of Enlightenment aesthetics is toward emphasis on the play of the imagination and its fecundity in generating associations.

Denis Diderot is an important and influential author on aesthetics. He wrote the entry “On the Origin and Nature of the Beautiful” for the Encyclopedia (1752). Like Lessing in Germany, Diderot not only philosophized about art and beauty, but also wrote plays and influential art criticism. Diderot is strongly influenced in his writings on aesthetics by the empiricism in England and Scotland, but his writing is not limited to that standpoint. Diderot repeats the classical dictum that art should imitate nature, but, whereas, for French classicists, the nature that art should imitate is ideal nature – a static, universal rational order – for Diderot, nature is dynamic and productive. For Diderot, the nature the artist ought to imitate is the real nature we experience, warts and all (as it were). The particularism and realism of Diderot’s aesthetics is based on a critique of the standpoint of French classicism (see Cassirer 1935, p. 295f.). This critique exposes the artistic rules represented by French classicists as universal rules of reason as nothing more than conventions marking what is considered proper within a certain tradition. In other words, the prescriptions within the French classical tradition are artificial , not natural , and constitute fetters to artistic genius. Diderot takes liberation from such fetters to come from turning to the task of observing and imitating actual nature . Diderot’s emphasis on the primeval productive power and abundance of nature in his aesthetic writings contributes to the trend toward focus on artistic creation and expression (as opposed to artistic appreciation and discernment) that is a characteristic of the late Enlightenment and the transition to Romanticism.

Lessing’s aesthetic writings play an important role in elevating the aesthetic category of expressiveness. In his famous Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), Lessing argues, by comparing the famous Greek statue with the representation of Laocoön’s suffering in Virgil’s poetry, that the aims of poetry and of the visual arts are not identical; he argues that the aim of poetry is not beauty, but expression. In elevating the aesthetic category of expressiveness, Lessing challenges the notion that all art is imitation of nature. His argument also challenges the notion that all the various arts can be deduced from a single principle. Lessing’s argument in Laocoön supports the contrary thesis that the distinct arts have distinct aims and methods, and that each should be understood on its own terms, not in terms of an abstract general principle from which all arts are to be deduced. For some, especially for critics of the Enlightenment, in this point Lessing is already beyond the Enlightenment. Certainly it is true that the emphasis on the individual or particular, over against the universal, which one finds in other late Enlightenment thinkers, is in tension with Enlightenment tenets. Herder (following Hamann to some extent) argues that each individual art object has to be understood in its own terms, as a totality complete unto itself. With Herder’s stark emphasis on individuality in aesthetics, over against universality, the supplanting of the Enlightenment with Romanticism and Historicism is well advanced. But, according to the point of view taken in this entry, the conception of the Enlightenment according to which it is distinguished by its prioritization of the order of abstract, universal laws and principles, over against concrete particulars and the differences amongst them, is too narrow; it fails to account for much of the characteristic richness in the thought of the period. Indeed aesthetics itself, as a discipline, which, as noted, is founded in the Enlightenment by the German rationalist, Alexander Baumgarten, owes its existence to the tendency in the Enlightenment to search for and discover distinct laws for distinct kinds of phenomena (as opposed to insisting that all phenomena be made intelligible through the same set of general laws and principles). Baumgarten founds aesthetics as a ‘science’ through the attempt to establish the sensible domain as cognizable in a way different from that which prevails in metaphysics. Aesthetics in Germany in the eighteenth century, from Wolff to Herder, both typifies many of the trends of the Enlightenment and marks the field where the Enlightenment yields to competing worldviews.

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• Crocker, Lester, 1959. An Age of Cisis: Man and World in eighteenth century French Thought , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• –––, 1963. Nature and Culture : Ethical Thought in the French Enlightenment , Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Dupré, Louis, 2004. The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi (ed.), 1997. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader , Cambridge, MA: Blackewell.
• –––, 2002. “Answering the Question, What Remains of the Enlightenment?”, Human Studies , 23(3): 281–288.
• Fleischacker, Samuel, 2013. What is Enlightenment? (Kant’s Questions) , New York: Routledge.
• Garrett, Aaron (ed.), 2014. The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy , New York: Routledge.
• Gay, Peter, 1966–69. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation , New York: Knopf.
• Hirschman, Albert O., 1991. The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Israel, Jonathan, 2001. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 , Oxford University Press.
• Kivy, Peter, 1973. “Introduction” to Francis Hutcheson: An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design , The Hague: Martinus, Nijhoff.
• Kramnick, Isaac, 1995. “Introduction” to The Portable Enlightenment Reader , New York: Penguin.
• Popkin, R. H., 1979. The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza , Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Schmidt, James (ed.), 1996. What is Enlightenment ? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• –––, 2000. “What Enlightenment Project?”, Political Theory , 28(6): 734–757.
• Strickland, Susan, 1994. “Feminism, Postmodernism and Difference”, in Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology , edited by Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford, New York: Routledge, 265–274.
• Zuckert, Rachel, 2014. “Aesthetics” in Garrett (ed.), Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy , London: Routledge.

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aesthetics: British, in the 18th century | aesthetics: French, in the 18th century | aesthetics: German, in the 18th century | Bacon, Francis | Bayle, Pierre | Burke, Edmund | Clarke, Samuel | Collins, Anthony | Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de | Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de: in the history of feminism | cosmopolitanism | Descartes, René | emotion: 17th and 18th century theories of | ethics: natural law tradition | German Philosophy: in the 18th century, prior to Kant | Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry (Baron) d’ | Hume, David | Kant, Immanuel | Kant, Immanuel: aesthetics and teleology | Locke, John | Mendelssohn, Moses | Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de | Newton, Isaac | Reid, Thomas | Scottish Philosophy: in the 18th Century | Shaftesbury, Lord [Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of] | toleration | Vico, Giambattista | Voltaire | Wolff, Christian

Acknowledgments

Mark Alznauer, Margaret Atherton, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Alan Nelson, Julius Sensat and Rachel Zuckert provided helpful comments on an earlier draft, which lead to substantial revisions.

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The Age of Enlightenment, an introduction

Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving a Lecture at the Orrery , c. 1766, oil on canvas, 147.2 x 203.2 cm ( Derby Museums and Art Gallery, England )

In A Philosopher Giving a Lecture at the Orrery by Joseph Wright of Derby we see an orrery— a mechanical model of the solar system. In the center is a gas light which represents the sun (though the child who stands in the foreground with his back to us block this from our view); the arcs represent the orbits of the planets. Wright concentrates on the faces of the figures to create a compelling narrative.

With paintings like these, Wright invented a new subject: scenes of experiments and new machinery. This was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (think cities, railroads, steam power, gas and then electric light, factories, and machines). Wright’s fascination with light, strange shadows, and darkness, reveals the influence of Baroque art .

Jean-Antoine Houdon, Voltaire , 1778, marble, 36.5 x 21.3 x 21.3 cm ( National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. )

Enlightenment

Toward the middle of the eighteenth century a shift in thinking occurred. This shift is known as the Enlightenment. You have probably already heard of some important Enlightenment figures, like Rousseau, Diderot and Voltaire. It is helpful I think to think about the word “enlighten” here—the idea of shedding light on something, illuminating it, making it clear.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment, influenced by the scientific revolutions of the previous century, believed in shedding the light of science and reason on the world in order to question traditional ideas and ways of doing things. The scientific revolution (based on empirical observation, and not on metaphysics or spirituality) gave the impression that the universe behaved according to universal and unchanging laws (think of Newton here). This provided a model for looking rationally on human institutions as well as nature.

Reason and equality

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contract social ou Principes du droit politique (or The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right ), 1762, France (photo: R.A. Leigh )

Rousseau, for example, began to question the idea of the divine right of Kings. In The Social Contract , he wrote that the King does not, in fact, receive his power from God, but rather from the general will of the people. This, of course, implies that “the people” can also take away that power.

The Enlightenment thinkers also discussed other ideas that are the founding principles of any democracy—the idea of the importance of the individual who can reason for himself, the idea of equality under the law, and the idea of natural rights. The Enlightenment was a period of profound optimism, a sense that with science and reason—and the consequent shedding of old superstitions—human beings and human society would improve.

You can probably tell already that the Enlightenment was anti-clerical; it was, for the most part, opposed to traditional Catholicism. Instead, the Enlightenment thinkers developed a way of understanding the universe called Deism—the idea, more or less, is that there is a God, but that this God is not the figure of the Old and New Testaments, actively involved in human affairs. He is more like a watchmaker who, once he makes the watch and winds it, has nothing more to do with it.

The Enlightenment, the monarchy, and the French Revolution

The Enlightenment encouraged criticism of the corruption of the monarchy (at this point King Louis XVI), and the aristocracy. Enlightenment thinkers condemned Rococo art for being immoral and indecent, and called for a new kind of art that would be moral instead of immoral, and teach people right and wrong.

Louis-Michel van Loo, Diderot , 1767, oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm ( Musée du Louvre, Paris )

Denis Diderot, Enlightenment philosopher, writer and art critic, wrote that the aim of art was “to make virtue attractive, vice odious, ridicule forceful; that is the aim of every honest man who takes up the pen, the brush or the chisel.” [1]

These new ways of thinking, combined with a financial crisis (the country was bankrupt) and poor harvests left many ordinary French people both angry and hungry. In 1789, the French Revolution began. In its initial stage, the revolutionaries asked only for a constitution that would limit the power of the king.

Ultimately the idea of a constitution failed, and the revolution entered a more radical stage. In 1792, King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, were deposed and ultimately beheaded along with thousands of other aristocrats believed to be loyal to the monarchy.

[1] Denis Diderot, Essai sur la peinture , 1765.

Bibliography

The Enlightenment from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Enlightenment from Professor Paul Brian at Washington State University

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What Is the Enlightenment and How Did It Transform Politics?

Explore how calls for liberty, equality, and individual rights caused revolutions around the world, from the American Revolution to the French and Haitian Revolutions.

A painting depicts Enlightenment thinkers — including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, and a bust of Voltaire — in a drawing room, gathered for a reading of Voltaire’s play “L’Orphelin de la Chine” in 1755.

Source: Anicet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier via Château de Malmaison

In 1627, officials in Cologne, Germany, accused Katharina Henot—a local postmaster and influential socialite—of witchcraft. They claimed she wielded magic and worked with the devil. The officials even accused Henot of infesting a local nunnery with a plague of caterpillars. For these alleged crimes, she was repeatedly tortured and publicly executed.

While extraordinary by today’s standards, Henot’s case was alarmingly common for the time. Between 1520 and 1700, Europe executed tens of thousands  of people—mostly women—on charges of witchcraft.

How did this happen? Surely anyone using science and reason could have deduced that such charges were ludicrous, right?

Then again, science and reason have not always prevailed.

For centuries, intellectual and political authority came from religion and other traditional beliefs. To understand the world—including phenomena such as plagues of caterpillars—people would turn to supernatural belief in witches or religious belief in Satan. To explain political systems—like why a particular family had absolute rule over a kingdom—leaders turned to religion, claiming a divine right from God. 

But during this time, a series of religious, political, and scientific upheavals began challenging the status quo, culminating in the Enlightenment.

This resource explores the history of the Enlightenment and the radical ways in which Enlightenment ideas changed society for centuries to come.

What was the Enlightenment?

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that sought to improve society through fact-based reason and inquiry. The Enlightenment brought secular thought to Europe and reshaped the ways people understood issues such as liberty, equality, and individual rights. Today those ideas serve as the cornerstone of the world’s strongest democracies.

What events led to the Enlightenment?

Prior to the Enlightenment, the Catholic Church reigned supreme as Europe’s preeminent religious and intellectual leader. However, during the 1500s and 1600s, several events began to challenge its hold on power.

Let’s explore three of the most important historical developments:

Religious Reformation: In the year 1517, a German monk and professor of theology named Martin Luther pinned a list of ninety-five arguments, or theses, to the doors of a cathedral. Those theses accused the Catholic Church of corruption and abuse of power. Luther claimed that every individual possessed a connection with God and that the Church did not monopolize the path to salvation.

Luther’s action produced a split within the Catholic Church and encouraged individuals to challenge the institution’s previously unquestionable authority. Thanks to rising literacy rates and the invention of the printing press just decades prior, Luther’s message reached a wide audience. The Bible was now being printed in the vernacular, and people began reading it for themselves rather than having priests explain it to them.

Political Upheaval: Europe reached a state of near-constant conflict in the 1500s, as leaders fought over land, resources, and competing interpretations of Christianity. An entire century of religious wars culminated in one of history’s deadliest conflicts: The Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). 

Two major consequences emerged from that conflict. First, the resulting peace helped establish the bedrock principle of international relations known as sovereignty —the concept that guarantees countries get to control what happens within their borders and prohibits meddling in another country’s domestic affairs. Second, it produced further criticism of the continent’s political and religious leaders after decades of combat had claimed millions of lives.

Scientific Revolution: In the early 1600s, English philosopher Francis Bacon revolutionized intellectual thought by demonstrating that scientific discovery could not be achieved through faith and religion but rather rigorous research and observation. His scientific method set the gold standard for future research. It also coincided with a wave of breakthroughs in the fields of astronomy, mathematics, and physics by scientists such as Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton.

Although many of those intellectuals were devout Christians who believed that science and religion were easily reconcilable, religious authorities nonetheless viewed those discoveries as threats to their power. Officials, for instance, placed Galileo under house arrest for his writings on how the earth revolved around the sun, which undermined the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Despite protestations from the Church, this era—known as the Scientific Revolution—led to a flourishing of empirical thought in Europe.

How did the Enlightenment change society?

On the heels of the Scientific Revolution came the Enlightenment—a movement that sought to apply similar methods of inquiry and discovery to the fields of law, religion, economics, and politics. Enlightenment scholars believed that such thinking could produce societies that were more equitable, just, and not beholden to the unchecked power of monarchs and religious leaders.

Let’s explore five influential ideas that emerged from the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:  

Opposition to Absolute Monarchy: Intellectuals such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke introduced the idea that no ruler should have unlimited power. Both argued that leaders derived their authority not from God but from the people. And Locke claimed that if the people opposed their leader, they had the right to replace their government with one that respected their rights.

Notably, few Enlightenment thinkers called for democracy as people understand the term today. Many intellectuals such as Voltaire believed that monarchy was the best way to advance social, political, and economic goals. However, the idea that citizens could hold their leaders accountable was revolutionary.

Separation of Powers: The Baron de Montesquieu argued that power should not be concentrated in just one person. Instead, he called for a balanced distribution of power between executive, legislative, and judicial authorities.

Enlightenment thinkers similarly called for a separation of church and state—the idea that government should not interfere in religious affairs, and vice versa. Writers such as Voltaire were highly critical of religion’s outsize influence in European policymaking, which had contributed to generations of conflict on the continent.

Liberty and Individual Rights: John Locke introduced the idea that all men possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Those rights, he argued, were inalienable, meaning they could not be taken away or constrained by law.

Calls for individual rights contributed to increased religious tolerance in Europe as various governments began providing religious minorities greater freedom to worship.

Equality:  Pre-Enlightenment Europe was highly unequal, with powerful individuals known as the nobility possessing exclusive rights to own land, avoid taxes, and hold privileged jobs, while the poorest members of society struggled to survive. The Enlightenment challenged this arrangement, as thinkers like Locke argued that all men were created equal and that no one should be born into more power than another.

However, many intellectuals believed that such equality only applied to white men. Rousseau saw groups such as women, ethnic minorities, and enslaved people as inherently inferior to white men. Nevertheless, marginalized groups often used those same Enlightenment arguments to advance their own cases for equality. English thinkers such as Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft wrote extensively in support of women’s access to the same rights and opportunities as men.

Free-Market Capitalism :  Scottish economist Adam Smith railed against the era’s prevailing economic policies such as mercantilism, in which each country sought to produce as much as possible domestically and import as little as possible from abroad. Through careful observation and research, Smith came to introduce groundbreaking economic theories —including supply and demand, free-market capitalism, comparative advantage, and minimal regulations —arguing that countries become richer when they make what they are best at producing and import what they are not. Those ideas continue to form the backbone of international trade .

Where did the Enlightenment inspire revolution?

As Enlightenment texts spread across the Atlantic, their ideas inspired revolutions .

American Revolution:  Political and intellectual leaders in Britain’s thirteen American colonies used Enlightenment values to justify their declaration of independence in 1776. Following the American Revolution , those Enlightenment principles—including liberty, equality, and individual rights—became enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, even though many rights were initially reserved mostly for landowning white men. It would take nearly a century for the United States to abolish the institution of slavery and several decades longer to extend the right to vote to women.

French Revolution:  News of the United States’ Enlightenment-inspired revolution ricocheted around the world. In 1788, Thomas Jefferson—then the U.S. minister to France—wrote to George Washington, noting that France “has been awakened by our revolution, they feel their strength, they are enlightened, their lights are spreading, and they will not retrograde.” Indeed, the following year France experienced its own revolution, which ultimately toppled the country’s monarchy.

Haitian Revolution:  In 1791, the inhabitants of France’s most profitable colony—Haiti, then known as Saint-Domingue—began demanding their own right to liberty and equality. Enslaved Haitians outnumbered slaveholders ten to one on the island. After a thirteen-year war, the Haitians defeated the French and established the first Black-led republic. European powers, however, did not immediately recognize Haiti as an independent country and instead forced Haiti to pay reparations to France over more than a hundred years.

Latin American Revolutions:  In the early 1800s, Enlightenment-educated leaders such as Simón Bolívar led movements for independence in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. However, while revolutionaries pledged to eliminate the colonial era’s racial and social hierarchies, independence rarely brought about equality. Instead, leaders frequently perpetuated the same unequal, undemocratic systems that benefited the landowning elite.

Across Latin America—as in the United States, France, and Haiti—Enlightenment values began the march toward fairer and more equitable societies, but it would take generations for many countries to begin fully realizing those ideals.

Where do we see Enlightenment ideas today? 

More than three centuries after John Locke wrote about the relationship between people and their government, the core tenets of his writing and those of his Enlightenment contemporaries continue to shape society. Many of the world’s strongest democracies, for example, actively support liberty, equality, and individual rights through their laws and norms .

But just as leaders did not universally accept Enlightenment ideas in Locke’s time, the same holds true today.

Many societies—above all, authoritarian countries —actively reject some or most of the Enlightenment’s founding principles. Governments in countries such as China, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Saudi Arabia quash civil liberties, oppose free and fair elections, reject perceived checks to their power, and—in certain instances—ignore separation of church and state.

Enlightenment ideas have even come under attack in democratic countries such as Brazil, Hungary, the Philippines, and Turkey. Leaders there have attempted to increase their power by undermining political freedoms and civil liberties in a trend known as democratic backsliding . As a result, the world has become less free and less democratic every year between 2005 and 2019.

The United States, as well, has long struggled to embrace all tenets of the Enlightenment. Inequality and systemic racism remain significant challenges, and sharp disparities persist in access to housing, wealth, education, and health care. Further, many in the United States dismiss facts and scientific inquiry; former President Donald J. Trump, for example, repeatedly sidelined top scientific experts while endorsing unproven COVID-19 medical treatments. And on January 6, 2021, the country’s free and fair elections came under direct assault when armed rioters—many with white supremacist ties—stormed the U.S. Capitol seeking to overturn the results of the presidential race.

Although trials for witchcraft are no longer a normal part of life around the world, many countries still have a long way to go before fully embodying the founding principles of the Enlightenment.

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The Enlightenment Causes and Effects

French Revolution

The enlightenment.

Both the French Revolution and the American Revolution before it were inspired by ideas from the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, or Age of Enlightenment, was an intellectual movement that began in Western Europe in the mid-1600s and continued until the late 18th century. It created an environment where traditional structures, ideas and practices were questioned and challenged.

The Enlightenment was driven by scepticism about traditional ideas and beliefs, intellectual curiosity and a desire for social, political and scientific progress.

Enlightenment thinkers and writers challenged existing knowledge and assumptions, seeking new information and a better understanding of humanity and the natural world. Most were empiricists: they expected new discoveries to meet certain standards of proof and verifiability before being accepted as fact. To achieve this, they developed a new system of thinking and investigation, the beginnings of what we now call the ‘scientific method’.

Before the Enlightenment, knowledge was largely derived from religious teachings, supposition and the writings of ancient forebears. During and after the Enlightenment, knowledge was produced by scientific processes, logic and reasoning.

The scientific Enlightenment

Today we know the Enlightenment chiefly for its scientific thinkers and their wonderful discoveries. In Italy, Galileo Galilei (1654-1742) developed an improved type of telescope that brought advances in astronomy. In the American colonies, Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) conducted a series of experiments involving electricity, battery power and lightning, the most famous involving Franklin flying a kite in the middle of an electrical storm.

In Britain, men like Isaac Newton (1642-1727) made significant contributions to the fields of mathematics and physics, most notably Newton’s theory of gravity, which according to legend was inspired by a falling apple.

Other notables of the scientific Enlightenment included Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Edmond Halley, William Herschel, Robert Hooke and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. Though they operated in different fields, these men sought scientific explanations to natural phenomena, where previous information had come from religion and folklore.

The political Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was not just concerned with the physical sciences. While scientists were exploring and investigating the natural world, other thinkers of the age were questioning the nature of humanity and human society.

These figures gave particular scrutiny to the nature of government and political power. Previously, rulers had legitimised their power and authority through the doctrine of ‘divine right’. They claimed their political power was a divine responsibility, a gift given to them by God.

In Europe, the Catholic church supported the notion of divine right by disseminating it among ordinary people. Because the power of kings and emperors came from God, it was beyond challenge; to engage in rebellion or disloyalty against one’s king was to disobey the will of God. The French king Louis XIV (1638-1715), great-grandfather of the doomed Louis XVI , was a devoutly religious leader who worked to expand and strengthen the doctrine of divine right in France.

Divine right challenged

Several Enlightenment philosophers questioned and challenged archaic political beliefs like the divine right of kings.

The men who did this were not revolutionaries or radical democrats. They had no wish to destroy the authority of kings and governments or to level social hierarchies. Nevertheless, they did not believe that political power emanated from God. In their view, governments existed to guard the nation, to protect the people and to secure their individual rights.

The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was in favour of strong government and absolutist monarchy. This type of government, Hobbes believed, was necessary to protect its citizens. Another Englishman, John Locke (1632-1704), argued that every individual was born with three inherent rights (life, liberty and property). These views about the relationship between government power and individual rights formed the theory of a ‘social contract’. In France, the best-known exponent of this theory was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78).

The Enlightenment in France

The Enlightenment differed from country to country and was shaped by local conditions and grievances. In France, the Enlightenment began to take shape in the early 1700s, reaching its peak by the middle of the century. The writers of the French Enlightenment were referred to as philosophes  (‘philosophers’). Their number included Denis Diderot , Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, Baron de Montesquieu and François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire) .

Politically, most of these philosophes were concerned with two issues: how to improve French law and government, and how to create a better society based on reason, logic and merit.

Some philosophes looked for ideas abroad, particularly in England. Montesquieu’s conception of the ‘separation of powers’, for example, was largely derived from the British political system. Voltaire spent three years in voluntary exile in England and later praised its democratic processes, its rule of law, its freedoms of religion and speech and its lack of arbitrary arrests and imprisonment. This stood in striking contrast to France, where royal power was often used to silence or punish critics, dissidents and free thinkers.

Views on religion

Voltaire and a couple of others aside, most Enlightenment thinkers did not engage in attacks or sustained criticism of the Catholic church. Most philosophes were Christian deists, not atheists. They maintained a belief in God but considered him a more benign figure than the vengeful, interventionist God of the Old Testament.

The analogy favoured by some was that God was a ‘cosmic watchmaker’, an all-powerful deity who had constructed the universe but left it to run according to natural laws. This reimagining of God, along with other tenets and practices of the Enlightenment, was criticised by the Catholic church.

Theological opposition to the Enlightenment was hardly surprising. For centuries the church had served as Europe’s largest repository of wisdom and knowledge. The political Enlightenment challenged the church’s stranglehold over knowledge, information and education. It also threatened the privileges and protections it enjoyed from the state.

Contribution to revolution

“Historians have long debated the exact relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In the minds of contemporaries, the Enlightenment laid the groundwork for the Revolution’s most important ideas and agendas. Within two years of its outbreak in 1789, it sparked radical movements in Britain, Haiti, and finally Ireland and Egypt.. The days of the Enlightenment seemed halcyon – a war of words, a battle of books – in comparison with the reality of trying to live in a republic and keep faith with its principles.” Margaret C. Jacob

The Enlightenment had a profound effect on the ideology of the French Revolution. Most of the notable Enlightenment philosophes were dead long before the fiscal crisis of the 1780s. Many of their writings pre-dated the revolution by decades (Diderot’s first Encyclopedie was published in 1752, Voltaire’s Letters on England in 1734, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws in 1748).

No significant Enlightenment texts predicted or suggested a revolution in France. Nevertheless, the Enlightenment certainly created an ideological context for revolution. Its political treatises triggered a wave of discussion and debate, some of it taking root in France’s salons and circles . This upsurge of political ideas created an environment where questioning and criticising the old order was not only possible, in many circles it was expected.

Importantly, the political philosophy of the Enlightenment stripped away much of the magic and mystique of the Ancien Régime . The Bourbon kings were no longer seen as representatives of God, they were simply men. France’s social hierarchies and inequalities were stripped of their ideological defences. According to the ideas of the Enlightenment, the ordinary people were born not only with rights but the right to expect better government. It was on this platform of ideas and assumptions that the French Revolution was constructed.

1. The Enlightenment was a long period of intellectual curiosity, scientific investigation and political debate. It began in western Europe in the mid 17th century and continued until the end of the 18th century.

2. The Enlightenment was marked by a refusal to accept old knowledge, ideas and suppositions. Enlightenment writers and thinkers preferred to use logic, reason, experimentation and observation to reach conclusions.

3. The political Enlightenment examined the nature of human society, government and power. It also questioned the relationship between the state and individuals, who were assumed to be born with natural rights.

4. In France, the Enlightenment emerged in the early 1700s and was driven by writers and intellectuals called philosophes . Among their number were men like Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire.

5. The philosophes of the French Enlightenment were mostly dead by the late 1700s so did not play a direct role in the revolution. Their ideas and writings lived on, however, stimulating discussion, sparking curiosity and creating an environment where revolutionary ideas could emerge and flourish.

Citation information Title: ‘The Enlightenment’ Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn , Steve Thompson Publisher: Alpha History URL: https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/enlightenment/ Date published: September 25, 2019 Date updated: November 7, 2023 Date accessed: September 14, 2024 Copyright: The content on this page is © Alpha History. It may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use .

A Summary and Analysis of Immanuel Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘What is Enlightenment?’, full title ‘Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, is a 1784 essay by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). As the longer title suggests, Kant’s essay is a response to a question (posed by a clergyman, Reverend Johann Friedrich Zöllner) concerning the nature of philosophical enlightenment .

What is enlightenment, and how best might it be achieved in a civilised society? These are the key questions Kant addresses, and poses answers to, in his essay, which can be read in full here . Below, we summarise the main points of his argument and offer an analysis of Kant’s position.

‘What is Enlightenment?’: summary

Kant begins ‘What is Enlightenment?’ by asserting that enlightenment is man’s emergence from self-imposed immaturity. He defines ‘immaturity’ here as the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. Kant’s message to his readers is that they should have the courage to use their own understanding, rather than relying on another person’s guidance. That is the ‘motto’ of enlightenment.

Kant acknowledges that remaining ‘immature’ is the easy option for most people, because it’s the lazy option. People can turn to a priest to be their moral conscience for them, or a doctor to determine their diet. Women have been rendered perpetually immature by men in order to keep them meek and ignorant.

The key to enlightenment, Kant asserts, is freedom. If people are granted that, enlightenment will follow. The problem is that most people aren’t free. Even those ‘guardians’ and authority figures who keep others enslaved are themselves victim of this system, which they inherit from those who have gone before them.

Kant distinguishes between what he considers a public freedom to exercise one’s reason (and to question the way things are) and the civic duty we have to obey orders without questioning them. For instance, a soldier engaged in military action cannot afford to question the order his superior gives him: he needs to obey the order without question, because that is his ‘civic’ duty at that moment.

But off-duty, if that soldier wished to philosophise publicly (e.g., in the role of a scholar) about the flaws in the military system, he should be free to do so.

The same goes for paying taxes. One can argue in parliament, or write pamphlets and newspaper articles about whether high taxation is a good thing (i.e., exercising one’s public duty to question things), but when the taxman sends you a bill, you’d better pay up (i.e., observe your civic duty).

Kant invites us to consider whether a society of priests could set down some rules which would be binding for generations to come. He says this would be wrong, because it denies future generations the chance to question such rules, and social development would be impeded as a result. He also argues that an enlightened monarch would allow his subjects true freedom to think and do as they wish in religious matters, and the monarch should keep his nose out of such matters.

Next, Kant argues that, at the time of writing, people are not living in an ‘enlightened age’ but in an ‘age of enlightenment’: that is, we’ve not attained full enlightenment yet because the process is a long one, but progress is (gradually) being made, thanks largely to the enlightened monarch under whom Kant himself is living, Frederick the Great.

Kant concludes ‘What is Enlightenment?’ by considering the difference between civil and intellectual and spiritual freedom. Perhaps paradoxically, the less civil freedom people have, the more intellectual freedom they gain, and as their intellectual abilities grow, so the health of a particular society grows as governments can start treating people with dignity.

‘What is Enlightenment?’: analysis

‘What is Enlightenment?’ is concerned with every citizen’s public right to use their reason: everyone in a civilised society, Kant argues, should have the freedom to question the status quo and take part in a debate about how society should be governed and maintained. But such public rights and freedoms need to be balanced by the citizen’s private or civic responsibility to obey the law, and observe the status quo, when required to.

In other words, even while we discuss and philosophise about how to improve society, we have to live in the one we currently have, and civilisation would break down if people chose, for instance, to stop following laws they considered unjust or refused to pay their taxes because they disagreed with the levels of taxation.

‘What is Enlightenment?’ is fundamentally a clarion-call to people about the need to ‘dare to be wise’. What is required is not merely intellect but also a willingness to engage one’s reason and exercise that reason upon the everyday things that govern our lives: political systems, financial structures, education, trade, and much else.

Enlightenment is mankind’s coming-to-maturity, a willingness to think for oneself and emerge from an immature state where we hand over the power and responsibility to authority figures, whether they’re priests, doctors, teachers, or politicians.

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Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique

Sebastian Conrad holds the Chair in Modern History at Freie Universität Berlin, where he has taught since 2010. He is the author of German Colonialism: A Short History (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century (University of California Press, 2010). He is currently writing an introduction to debates in the field of global history.

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Sebastian Conrad, Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique, The American Historical Review , Volume 117, Issue 4, October 2012, Pages 999–1027, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/117.4.999

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Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore and arch-enemy of the British, began in the 1790s to fashion himself as an enlightened monarch: he was one of the founding members of the (French) Jacobin club in Seringapatam, had planted a liberty tree, and asked to be addressed as Tipu Citoyen —and he reformed the military and economy according to European models. But his eclectic form of rule also drew on the cultural repertoire of South Asian Hinduism and at the same time, the large Hindu majority of his population notwithstanding, on Islamic traditions. Tipu Sultan corresponded with the caliph of the Ottoman Empire and stylized his resistance against British expansion as a battle between Islam and Christendom. One should not conclude, however, that his interest in things European—he was a collector of clocks and eyeglasses, but also of scientific instruments, and had installed a printing press—was nothing but a fascination for exotic curios. Rather, it needs to be understood as a practice meant to demonstrate the universal character of his rule. Watercolor, ca. 1790, by an anonymous Indian artist.

T he E nlightenment has long held a pivotal place in narratives of world history. It has served as a sign of the modern, and continues to play that role yet today. The standard interpretations, however, have tended to assume, and to perpetuate, a Eurocentric mythology. They have helped entrench a view of global interactions as having essentially been energized by Europe alone. Historians have now begun to challenge this view. A global history perspective is emerging in the literature that moves beyond the obsession with the Enlightenment's European origins.

The dominant readings are based on narratives of uniqueness and diffusion. The assumption that the Enlightenment was a specifically European phenomenon remains one of the foundational premises of Western modernity, and of the modern West. The Enlightenment appears as an original and autonomous product of Europe, deeply embedded in the cultural traditions of the Occident. According to this master narrative, the Renaissance, humanism, and the Reformation “gave a new impetus to intellectual and scientific development that, a little more than three and a half centuries later, flowered in the scientific revolution and then in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.” 1 The results included the world of the individual, human rights, rationalization, and what Max Weber famously called the “disenchantment of the world.” 2 Over the course of the nineteenth century, or so the received wisdom has it, these ingredients of the modern were then exported to the rest of the world. As William McNeill exulted in his Rise of the West , “We, and all the world of the twentieth century, are peculiarly the creatures and heirs of a handful of geniuses of early modern Europe.” 3

This interpretation is no longer tenable. Scholars are now challenging the Eurocentric account of the “birth of the modern world.” Such a rereading implies three analytical moves: First, the eighteenth-century cultural dynamics conventionally rendered as “Enlightenment” cannot be understood as the sovereign and autonomous accomplishment of European intellectuals alone; it had many authors in many places. Second, Enlightenment ideas need to be understood as a response to cross-border interaction and global integration. Beyond the conventional Europe-bound notions of the progress of “reason,” engaging with Enlightenment has always been a way to think comparatively and globally. And third, the Enlightenment did not end with romanticism: it continued throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Crucially, this was not merely a history of diffusion; the Enlightenment's global impact was not energized solely by the ideas of the Parisian philosophes . Rather, it was the work of historical actors around the world—in places such as Cairo, Calcutta, and Shanghai—who invoked the term, and what they saw as its most important claims, for their own specific purposes.

The opening page of Immanuel Kant's famous essay “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” Berlinische Monatsschrift , December 1784, 481.

Enlightenment, in other words, has a history—and this history matters; it is not an entity, a “thing” that was invented and then disseminated. We must move beyond a preoccupation with definitions that make the meaning of Enlightenment immutable. Ever since Immanuel Kant's famous 1784 essay in the Berlinische Monats-schrift , historians have pondered his question “Was ist Aufklärung?” (What is Enlightenment?). The scholarly battle between attempts to define its substance and efforts to legislate its limits has generated a massive bibliography. 4 The responses have been manifold, depending on time and place, but they have not yielded an authoritative definition. Rather, they demonstrate just how malleable the concept really was.

Take, for example, an allegory by the Japanese artist Shōsai Ikkei in 1872 that we can read as one possible answer to Kant, albeit with the benefit of almost a century of hindsight. In his woodblock print titled Mirror of the Rise and Fall of Enlightenment and Tradition , he depicts the conflicts and battles between the new and the old in early Meiji Japan (1868–1912), with the new clearly gaining the upper hand. (See Figure 3 .) Not all of the items would have made it onto Kant's list: the print shows a Western umbrella defeating a Japanese paper parasol, a chair prevailing over a traditional stool, a pen over a brush, brick over tile, short hair vanquishing the traditional chonmage hairstyle with the top of the head shaved, and so forth. The whole process is driven by a steam locomotive, a towering symbol of the spirit of progress that enthralled contemporary Japanese. And in the center of the print, a gas lamp subdues a candle, thus more than symbolically enlightening all that seemed dark in premodern Japan.

The crucial term in the title of the print is kaika , conventionally rendered as “Enlightenment”; it is also translated as “civilization” and bears connotations of social evolutionism. 5 In this image, it is depicted less as a quasi-natural development, as suggested by Kant—Enlightenment, he wrote, “is nearly inevitable, if only it is granted freedom”—and more as a violent battle. Civilization/Enlightenment came not only with the power of conviction, but also with the use of force; not only with the promise of emancipation—“mankind's exit from its self-incurred immaturity”—but also with “the mobilization, on its behalf, of effective means of physical coercion,” as postcolonial scholars would put it yet a century later. 6

Equally significant is the inclusion of an object in the parade of enlightened modernity that would hardly seem to belong there: a rickshaw. On the right-hand side of the print, a man labeled “rickshaw” is trampling on another representing an oxcart, the preferred conveyance of Tokugawa elites. Unlike the other objects alluded to, the rickshaw was not imported from Europe, but was in fact an invention of the early Meiji period. It nonetheless went on to become a symbol of the new times, together with the brick buildings of the Ginza, the trains, clocks, and artificial light. The depiction of the rickshaw is thus a reminder that what was perceived as new, civilized, or enlightened was in fact highly ambivalent and hybrid, the product of local conditions and power structures more than the actualization of a blueprint conceived in eighteenth-century Paris, Edinburgh, or Königsberg.

Shōsai Ikkei, Kaika injun kōhatsu kagami , 1872. Waseda University Library.

Emphasizing the variations in usage of “Enlightenment” around the world implies a rejection of earlier narrow definitions of the term. 7 Recent work on European history has been increasingly skeptical of the idea that the Enlightenment represents a coherent body of thought. Historians focus instead on the ambivalences and the multiplicity of Enlightenment views. One strand of scholarship concerned with the intellectual debates has made it clear that the various European Enlightenments have to be situated in the specific contexts—Halle, Naples, Helsinki, and Utrecht, among others—to which they were responding and within which they generated their sometimes very different and centrifugal dynamics. 8 John Pocock, in a monumental work, has reconstructed the way in which Edward Gibbon engaged with many different “Enlightenments.” 9 Jonathan Israel and others have significantly extended the perspective backward in time and thereby complicated our understanding of the Enlightenment. 10 A second strand of scholarship has looked at the social history of ideas and communication, thus further contributing to the idea of Enlightenment heterogeneity. As soon as the focus is moved from lofty philosophical debates to the material production of the public sphere and to the forms of popular mentalities, the picture becomes much less uniform. The Enlightenment, broadly conceived, was thus fragmented, socially and across gender lines. 11 The entrenched dichotomy of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment has also been called into question. 12 And finally, the convenient fiction of the eighteenth century as the Age of Reason has begun to recede. It has become increasingly clear that the Enlightenment cannot simply be equated with secularization, but on the contrary was deeply embedded in religious world views. 13 Therefore, the stylization of the period as an age of disenchantment is itself a modern myth. Instead, popular social practices such as occultism, mesmerism, and magic not only survived, but were enmeshed with elite culture, empirical science, and the celebration of reason. 14

At present, only a small—if vociferous—minority of historians maintain the unity of the Enlightenment project. 15 Most authors stress its plural and contested character: Enlightenments, or—as the French term, in wise anticipation, has framed it since the eighteenth century— les lumières . 16 It is no accident that the very term “Enlightenment” was originally a rallying cry issued by the Catholic and royalist adversaries of the French philosophes . 17 The unity of the phenomenon was thus constituted by its enemies. It became further entrenched when it was appropriated in Latin America and Asia as a seemingly integrated and unified body of thought. “Enlightenment” as a reified concept has, in other words, primarily been the slogan used by historical actors to label a movement that should be either fought or imitated. The Enlightenment was “a state of intellectual tension,” as Judith Shklar has phrased it, “rather than a sequence of similar propositions.” 18

Such a broad understanding is a helpful point of departure for moving us beyond the different ways in which the current historiography has understood the Enlightenment's role in global history. It may help us focus on the transnational conditions that went into the making of eighteenth-century Enlightenment, mainly in the Atlantic world, but elsewhere as well. Finally, it enables us to move the discussion to the nineteenth century and trace the way in which these debates were extended throughout Asia, as “Enlightenment” became a concern for social reformers across the globe. 19

In privileging connections and synchronic contexts in space over long intellectual continuities in time, a global history perspective has fundamental consequences for our understanding of “Enlightenment.” Few other terms are as normatively charged or as heavily invested with notions of European uniqueness and superiority, and few have gained as much potency in contemporary political debates. Situating the history of the Enlightenment in a global context will thus have unsettling and potentially salutary implications. In the last instance, such a perspective de-centers the debate on universalism that is so crucially linked to general notions of Enlightenment thought. It was not so much the inbuilt universality of enlightened claims that enabled it to spread around the world. Rather, it was the global history of references to the Enlightenment, of re-articulation and reinvention, under conditions of inequalities of power, that transformed multiple claims on Enlightenment into a ubiquitous presence.

“E nlightenment scholars ,” D orinda O utram has acknowledged, “have yet to come to grips with the issues of the relationship between the Enlightenment and the creation of a global world.” 20 To date, three metanarratives have dominated interpretations of the role of the Enlightenment in world history. In general textbooks and survey courses, the Enlightenment is usually portrayed as the apotheosis of universal reason at the expense of religion and traditional cosmologies, and as promoting an encompassing rationalization of social and cultural life. It stands, in short, for secular progress. 21 The birth of the Enlightenment, according to the standard version, was entirely and exclusively a European affair: only when it was fully fledged was it then diffused around the globe. This diffusionist view has led to such questions as why the emancipation of religious authority did not develop outside the West. 22 The standard paradigm is based on a logic of repetition, deferral, and derivation. “The Enlightenment was a European phenomenon,” Jürgen Osterhammel has said in summarizing the prevailing view, “that had multifaceted effects around the world but originated only in Europe.” 23

Against this dominant view, a second interpretation has emerged, based on a radically critical view of the Enlightenment. Scholars in the field of postcolonial studies have focused on direct connections between Enlightenment thinking and imperialism. This view shares with the dominant paradigm of benevolent modernization the assumption that the Enlightenment was a uniquely European invention. It also equates the Enlightenment with the “march of universal reason.” In addition, it shares the diffusionist view of the first interpretation. But here the spread of the Enlightenment's message is seen not as emancipation but as deprivation.

Two different but related arguments are involved. The first is the hypothesis that the expansionist desire of the West was rooted in Enlightenment thinking proper. It was only a small step, according to this critique, between positing universal standards and deciding to intervene and to implement those standards, also by force, under the auspices of a paternalistic civilizing mission. In one of the more extreme statements, “the new forms of man-made violence unleashed by post-seventeenth-century Europe in the name of Enlightenment values” are then seen to lead not only to imperialism, but also to “the Third Reich, the Gulag, the two World Wars, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.” 24 The second argument is that the spread of Enlightenment cosmology needs to be understood as a form of cultural imperialism with the potential to eradicate alternative world views. 25 Critical scholars have interpreted the spread of Enlightenment tenets in the nineteenth century as a process of coerced and oftentimes brutal diffusion, made possible and driven by highly asymmetrical relations of power. 26

The postcolonial critique has done much to help us understand the complexities of knowledge transfer under conditions of colonialism. In particular, it has sharpened our sensibility for the asymmetrical structures of exchange and urged us “to write into the history of modernity the ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and the ironies that attend it.” 27 A critical global history perspective that is not intended to reproduce a liberal ideology of globalization needs to build on these approaches. But that does not imply that eighteenth-century Enlightenment debates already contained the seeds of imperialism; recent scholarship has shown to what extent Enlightenment thinkers were engaged in a fundamental critique of imperialism and its underlying assumptions. 28 And in its more radical formulations, the postcolonial critique runs the danger of postulating incompatible regimes of knowledge, civilizational orders between which dialogue is virtually impossible. Such cultural essentialisms may prevent us from recognizing the extent to which both allegedly pure indigenous traditions and seemingly universal forms of Western knowledge are the result of complex processes of interaction.

Emancipatory modernization and cultural imperialism are both deeply diffusionist and take the Enlightenment's European origins for granted. What is more, they rely on the absence of Enlightenment elsewhere as one of their axiomatic tenets. In recent years, however, the European claim to originality, to exclusive authorship of the Enlightenment, has been called into question. Historians have begun to look for parallels and analogies, for autochthonous processes of rationalization that did not depend on developments in Europe but led to similar results. This quest forms part of a larger scholarly debate on the origins of modernity. It was born out of a desire to challenge diffusionist notions of modernization, and to acknowledge the social dynamics that existed in many societies before their encounter with the West. The aim was to replace older notions of traditional societies and “people without history” with a broader understanding of the multifaceted “early modernities.” 29

While much of the scholarship that has attempted to de-Europeanize the Enlightenment has been concerned with Latin America and Haiti, an especially powerful claim to “early modernities” has been made in the context of Asian history. The genealogy of these debates leads us back to such classic works as Robert Bellah's Tokugawa Religion (1957). In this book, he attempted to locate the origins of modern Japan in certain strands of Confucian thinking, a “functional analogue to the Protestant Ethic” that Max Weber singled out as the driving force behind Western capi-talism. 30 Bellah's analysis set a precedent for an outpouring of works aimed at pluralizing the notion of modernization. In the Islamic world, Peter Gran saw in eighteenth-century Egypt a form of “cultural revival” in the making—specifically Islamic origins of modernization long before Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. 31 In his quest for an independent “Islamic Enlightenment,” Reinhard Schulze has argued that the “idea of autonomy of thought that through experience and reason arrives at truth was formulated by a large number of Islamic thinkers” in the eighteenth century. 32 In East Asia, Mark Elvin sees in eighteenth-century China “a trend towards seeing fewer dragons and miracles, not unlike the disenchantment that began to spread across the Europe of the Enlightenment.” 33 Likewise, Joel Mokyr is convinced that “some of the developments that we associate with Europe's Enlightenment resemble events in China remarkably.” 34

These recent interventions provide welcome reminders that the image of non-Western societies as stagnating and immobile is wide of the mark. The West did not have a monopoly on cultural transformations and intellectual conflicts. Such an archaeology of independent seeds of the modern is frequently connected to the larger project to revise modernization theory, and to replace it with the paradigm of early, alternative, and multiple modernities. 35 But this refashioning of modernization theory is no less problematic. In the last instance, the paradigm of multiple modernities also posits an identical telos—modern, capitalist society—even if this goal is achieved not by the transformations inspired by contact with the West, but rather on the basis of recently “rediscovered” indigenous cultural resources: a teleology of universal disenchantment, realized in each society internally, but across the globe. It is the specter of parallels—“the search for the Indian Vico, the Chinese Descartes, the Arab Montaigne”—that continues to haunt the recent quest for alternative modernities. 36 The emphasis is on the internal conditions and dynamics of change—and on the “strange parallels” between widely separated parts of the globe. 37 In this way, the history of the modern age is constructed as an order of analogous, autopoietic civilizations, thereby neglecting, and indeed effacing, the long history of entanglements and systemic integration of the world. Reducing the complex and locally specific histories of cultural transformation to an indigenous prehistory of the modern thus tends to obfuscate the larger structures and power asymmetries that brought about the modern world. 38

T hese three paradigms—modernization , postcolonialism, and multiple modernities—converge in their methodological bias toward national and civilizational frames. Their many differences notwithstanding, they all rely on internalist logics in their attempt to explain what was in fact a global phenomenon. In response to stimulating recent scholarship, however, we need to place the various notions of “Enlightenment” in the context of connectivities that shaped and reconfigured societies globally. Referring to the issue of modernity, Sanjay Subrahmanyam has argued that it is “historically a global and conjunctural phenomenon, not a virus that spreads from one place to another. It is located in a series of historical processes that brought hitherto relatively isolated societies into contact, and we must seek its roots in a set of diverse phenomena.” 39 From such a vantage point, it is less instructive to search for alleged origins—European or otherwise—than to focus on the global conditions and interactions in which the “Enlightenment” emerged.

Debates about Enlightenment were the product of related attempts to come to terms with a global situation. They were conducted within a space that transcended the boundaries of Western Europe, and the circulation of concepts and ideas followed a variety of trajectories. 40 These debates were linked across borders, but they did not unfold everywhere or equally. The trajectory of interactions was not indiscriminate, but was conditioned by the larger structures of the world economy and political powers such as the British Empire. Invoking the “Enlightenment” presupposed some relation with Europe, even when references were primarily rhetorical and strategic. Connections reached beyond the integrated Atlantic world, but the speed and density of contacts was highly uneven; while Madras was part of multiple networks in the Indian Ocean and beyond, Korea, the “hermit kingdom,” aimed at isolation, and intellectual transfers reached social elites in port cities earlier than elsewhere, if at all. 41

Related to these different forms of cultural interaction, a spate of exciting new scholarship has resituated the emergence of Enlightenment thinking. So far, most of these studies have addressed a particular literature, while a synthetic picture has yet to emerge. But drawing on this work allows Enlightenment debates to be read in a context that transcended Europe. The globality of eighteenth-century Enlightenment needs to be located on two levels: it was a product of, and a response to, global conjunctures; and it was the work of many authors in different parts of the world.

The production of knowledge in the late eighteenth century was structurally embedded in larger global contexts, and much of the debate about Enlightenment in Europe can be understood as a response to the challenges of global integration. The non-European world was always present in eighteenth-century intellectual discussions. No contemporary genre was more popular and more influential than the travelogue. 42 Accounts of the Hurons in North America, of the Polynesian Omai who was taken to England by Captain Cook in 1774, and of the Mandarins at the Chinese court reached a broad readership and found their way into popular culture. Most direct was the impact of the idealization of the reign of the Qing emperors Kangxi (1661–1722) and Qianlong (1736–1795); China was posited as the incarnation of an enlightened and meritocratic society—and instrumentalized for criticisms of absolutist rule in Europe. 43

But the appropriation of the world was not confined to its function as a mirror. In many ways, central elements of the cultural transformations that are customarily summarized as “Enlightenment” need to be understood as a reaction to the global entanglements of the times. The expansion of Europe's horizons that had begun in the Age of Discovery and culminated in the voyages of James Cook and Louis de Bougainville resulted in the incorporation of the “world” into European systems of knowledge. In particular, the emergence of the modern sciences can be seen as an attempt to come to terms with global realities. Further examples include the discussions about the character of humanity following the interventions of Bartolomé de las Casas; the idea of the law of nations and an international world order as proposed by Hugo Grotius; the ethnological and geographical explorations of the globe; the comparative study of language and religion; the theories of free trade and the civilizing effects of commerce; and the notions of race, on the one hand, and cosmopolitanism, on the other. The perception of an increasingly interlinked globe posed a cognitive challenge that was gradually met by reorganizing knowledge and the order of the disciplines. 44

On this level, the worldliness of the European Enlightenment was not limited to references to distant places, instrumentalized essentially as mirrors of the Self—such as Montesquieu's imagined Orient in his lettres persanes . Neither is it helpful to calculate balances of influence, a kind of cultural import-export sheet that weighs the diffusion of Occidental culture against borrowing from the East—porcelain and tea, but also ideas of a just life. Instead, we need to understand the production of knowledge in the late eighteenth century as fundamentally tied to conditions of globality: as a specific way of incorporating the world in the context of the expansion of European trade relations, the annexation of military and commercial bases and colonies, and the cartographic mapping of the globe. Crucially, these debates did more than merely express the fact of entanglement as such; rather, the particular modes and structures of integration affected the terms that were employed and the theories that were developed. Geopolitical hierarchies, in other words, found their way into the very content of the vocabulary that was devised to think the world. The dichotomies of civilization and barbarism, as well as the discovery of a progressive regime of time and the stadial theories of history, for example, responded not only to the broadening of horizons, but specifically to emerging European hegemony—or, more precisely, to what Europeans perceived as such, even though their traders were still complying with local rules in Asia, and Lord Macartney was compelled to kneel in front of the Chinese emperor.

Enlightenment debates were thus always political moments, never just intellectual appropriations of an abstract world. The invention of “Eastern Europe,” for example, not only represented the stages of civilization prescribed by conjectural history, but was closely tied to power differentials on the Continent. 45 And when Hegel defined freedom in terms of master and slave, he reformulated an Aristotelian ontology that should also be placed within the long history of relentless expropriation and slavery that shaped the Atlantic economy. 46 The mapping of the world was situated in, and corresponded to, the asymmetrical power relationships that structured the integration of the globe.

The intellectual discussions of eighteenth-century Europe not only were situated in a global context, they were also received, appropriated, and indeed made globally. The history of Enlightenment debates was a history of exchanges and entanglements, of translations and quotations, and of the co-production of knowledge. “Whose Enlightenment was it, anyway?” Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has asked, and this question can easily be extended beyond the Atlantic world. 47 The Enlightenment, as recent scholarship suggests, was the work of many actors and the product of global interactions.

In particular, historians have underscored the global gathering of facts and information and the co-production of modern knowledge regimes. Historians of science have contributed to a broad view of the transregional networks and cross-border circulations that fed into Enlightenment science and world views. 48 The geographic reach of these networks was broad, ranging from Latin America all the way to Tibet, Japan, and Oceania. 49 But in contrast to an earlier literature that was based on a diffusionist reading of scientific encounters, historians have begun to emphasize the degree to which “scientific knowledge [is made] through co-constructive processes of negotiation of skilled communities and individuals” in many parts of the world, “resulting as much in the emergence of new knowledge forms as in a reconfiguration of existing knowledges and specialized practices on both sides of the encounter.” 50

This literature suggests that to a large degree, the production of knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment was not confined to the academy and the laboratory, but came out of forms of “open air science” in a multiplicity of contact zones in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Circulation itself emerged as a central ingredient of knowledge formation. To be sure, these relationships were by no means equal; economically, politically, and militarily, the balance was skewed, usually—but not always—in favor of Europeans. But the asymmetrical conditions of knowledge production did not preclude the active cooperation of a wide variety of actors. “Important parts of what passes off as ‘Western’ science,” concludes Kapil Raj, “were actually made outside the West.” 51

The philosophical and political vocabulary of the Enlightenment was also a global creation. In many cases, this was a result of the purposeful reformulation of a particular body of thought and practice associated with the “Enlightenment” in Europe. Thus our attention shifts from the salons in Paris, Berlin, and Naples to the conditions under which cultural elites in Caracas and Valparaiso, in Madras and Cairo, engaged with its claims. Engagement with Enlightenment propositions reached well beyond Western Europe—from Greece and Russia, where Catherine II refashioned herself as an “enlightened monarch” intent on correcting the “irrational” course of history, to Philadelphia, the birthplace of the American Declaration of Independence—a document of global reach, “an instrument, pregnant with our own and the fate of the world,” as Thomas Jefferson contemplated in retrospect. 52 In cultural centers such as Lima and Bogotá, small groups of Creole “Enlighteners” ( ilustrados ) engaged with the ideas of European philosophers while also mining the earlier works of indigenous elites in their quest to challenge crucial assumptions of European Enlightenment rationality and the Eurocentrism of European theories about Latin America. 53

The late-eighteenth-century reference to Enlightenment ideas was not confined to the Atlantic world. In other places as well, European expansion set in motion a confrontation with claims for the validity of Enlightenment propositions. In Egypt, for example, Napoleon's expedition served as a trigger for social transformations that harked back to debates about inner-Islamic reform, but now were also legitimized by referring to the authority of the Enlightenment. 54 In India, it was Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore and arch-enemy of the British, who fashioned himself an enlightened monarch: he was one of the founding members of the (French) Jacobin Club in Seringapatam, had planted a liberty tree, and asked to be addressed as “Tipu Citoyen .” 55

Analytically, it is important to recognize that the widespread engagement with these terms and ideas did not leave them unaffected. As actors in different situations and moments mobilized concepts for their own concerns, their re-articulations set in motion a process of displacement. These reformulations were the product of particular historical situations, but their impact went beyond their local effects. Moments of appropriation were thus frequently instances of programmatic radicalization. The most powerful example of this kind of redefinition was the revolution in Haiti (Saint-Domingue) in 1791, only two years after the fall of the Bastille. As Laurent Dubois phrased it, “The democratic possibilities imperial powers would claim they were bringing to the colonies had in fact been forged, not within the boundaries of Europe, but through the struggles over rights that spread throughout the Atlantic Empires.” 56

The most radical revolution of the Age of Revolution had many causes, chief among them structural conflicts in a slaveholder society and the transformations of the Atlantic economy. At the same time, the French Revolution and the symbolic power of the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789 were important reference points. The spokespersons for the rebellious slaves and the gens de couleur frequently formulated their claims in the language of republican rights. 57 As important as the transfer of ideas was, the rebellion was not just a distant and peripheral effect of the French Revolution. As recent work has amply demonstrated, it had world-historical significance of its own. It was part of the revolution of the public sphere that spanned the Atlantic and beyond, extending to social groups beyond the bourgeois European elites. 58 Most importantly, it reframed the parameters of the debate on human rights, as—the long history of enlightened critique of slavery notwithstanding—the Assemblée nationale in Paris had explicitly denied the extension of civil rights to slaves. The eventual transfer of the rights of man to the slave population “did challenge the ontological and political assumptions of the most radical writers of the Enlightenment.” 59 The notion of humanité as it was employed in metropolitan France was based on a largely abstract concern with natural rights; only its refashioning in the Caribbean turned the appeal to “humanity” into the claim with universal reach that it was retrospectively taken to have always been. The universalization of the rights of man—nothing less was at stake—was thus the result of a circulation of ideas and their re-articulation under colonial conditions. 60

Finally, the appropriation of concepts and ideas needs to be situated in a broad context of transnational entanglements in which transfers from Europe were only one factor, albeit an important one. The global remaking of Enlightenment claims was a result of the hybridization of ideas and practices. As the example of Haiti shows, the various forms of appropriation were part of complex transcultural flows. Radical claims as formulated in Paris were received and mobilized in Haiti, for example by Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the slave rebellion. Toussaint had read the strident critique of European colonialism in Raynal's multivolume Histoire des deux Indes , and was particularly impressed by Raynal's prediction of the coming of a “Black Spartacus.” 61 But Europe was not the sole source of inspiration. Two-thirds of the slaves had been born in Africa and came from diverse political, social, and religious backgrounds. This enabled them to draw on specific notions of kingdom and just government from Western and Central Africa, and to employ religious practices such as voodoo for the formation of revolutionary communities. 62 The revolution in Haiti was the result of the triangular trade in the Atlantic world, not only in goods and laborers, but in practices and ideas as well. Events in Haiti, for their part, forced the French National Convention to abolish slavery in 1794. The ripples of this transnational event were again palpable in both Americas, and remained an influential reference globally. 63 The processes of mixing and hybridization were characteristic—and indeed constitutive—of the career of Enlightenment ideas and practices. The negotiation of different intellectual and cultural resources was a normal and integral part of this history.

E nlightenment was more than a self-contained moment in European history. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, it was produced in a regime of global synchronicity. But it did not stop there. Moving beyond that literature, it is possible to trace the trajectory of Enlightenment through the nineteenth century. A case can be made, then, for a long history of Enlightenment. Scholars have so far ignored this possibility, assuming that the development of the Enlightenment substantially came to an end around 1800, if not before, and that it resurfaced as an object of scholarly concern only in the 1930s and 1940s. 64 But this chronology is Eurocentric, in that it erases the vibrant and heated contestations of “Enlightenment” in the rest of the world, particularly in Asia. Crucially, these debates should not be seen as merely the aftereffects of a foundational moment. Instead, the various reformulations of Enlightenment standards were part of its continuous history. 65

Such a claim may immediately evoke two objections. Was this still “the Enlightenment,” and are we justified in subsuming a variety of debates in places such as India, the Philippines, and Korea under that rubric? And if so, was this not essentially a process of diffusion, a process by which a template of thoughts and ideas was transferred from Europe to the rest of the world? This second concern would also suggest that there is not much to learn about the Enlightenment by following the history of its dissemination.

Let us bracket the latter issue for a moment and address the question of the Enlightenment's substance. Do nineteenth-century global appropriations of Enlightenment shed light on “Enlightenment itself”? This question is wrongly put, as it assumes an essential and firmly fixed Enlightenment. Such an axiomatic definition forecloses every possibility of global perspectives, as it reads all variations as deficit and lack. But Enlightenment was not a thing; rather, we should ask what historical actors did with it. Enlightenment should not be confused with an analytical category. It was primarily a concept used to formulate and legitimize particular claims. “Scholars should not try for a slightly better definition,” Frederick Cooper has said in his discussion of the term “modernity.” “They should instead listen to what is being said in the world.” Thus, if Enlightenment is “what they hear, they should ask how it is being used and why.” 66

Indeed, when social reformers around the globe tapped into Enlightenment rhetoric, they were able to filter a multiplicity of claims through its vocabulary. For some, the concept denoted a commitment to reason, to “improvement,” and some kind of emancipation, however differently defined. But “Enlightenment” was also employed to dismantle tariffs and to create private property in land; it was invoked to legitimize free love and to allow the remarriage of widows; it was quoted in support of the reform of penal systems and spawned discussions on national character; it was cited as authorizing the introduction of department stores, the use of underwear, the spread of pocket watches and of horizontal script, and the introduction of the Western calendar. “Whenever we open our mouths,” confessed the Japanese reformer Tsuda Mamichi in the 1870s, “it is to speak of ‘enlightenment.’ ” 67

This implies that over the course of its global career, the label “Enlightenment” became to some degree detachable from the notions and ideas with which it was first associated. Thus, for example, the secularizing impulse of the label could be turned on its head: “There is no religion in the world today that promotes enlightenment as does Christianity,” Tsuda insisted in words that would have elicited a scowl from Voltaire and Diderot in the eighteenth century—and from Jonathan Israel in the twenty-first. 68 This should not simply be discarded as a cultural misunderstanding. We cannot understand the global manifestations of Enlightenment by comparing them with an abstract blueprint, but only by looking at the concrete constellations in which “Enlightenment” was invoked—as authority, goal, or warning. It is less important, in other words, to compare the demands of, say, Philippine ilustrados diachronically with tenets of eighteenth-century Europe than it is to understand what labeling them as part of a Philippine “Enlightenment” implied in the closing years of the nineteenth century.

As dazzling as the variety of references was, it was not indiscriminate. When social reformers tapped into its vocabulary, references were sometimes explicitly to “Enlightenment” and vernacular equivalents of the term. But we do not always find that word. Once a set of ideas had been established and associated with the Enlightenment, it was also possible to appropriate it elsewhere without using the same vocabulary. In these cases, too, reformist elites drew on a specific group of ideas, texts, and authors, frequently sparked by translation movements of various kinds. Works by figureheads of the movement—Rousseau and Voltaire, Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin, but also Fukuzawa Yukichi and Liang Qichao—were made available to local audiences through publications and translations. Thus we can treat these debates about improvement and change as related but not converging phenomena—even if the labels attached to them ranged from “Enlightenment,” as in East Asia, to “Renaissance,” as in Bengal and the Arab world.

Nor was the chronology of these debates accidental. The timing typically corresponded to moments in which local crises were linked to the deep social transformations triggered by the integration of these societies into the world economy and imperialist order. 69 In such moments of domestic and external urgency, proponents of change linked their claims for social renewal both to traditional resources and to the newly available Enlightenment discourse in order to link their programs of social reform to the authority of European power. In parts of India, in the context of the self-styled “Bengal Renaissance,” tenets of the post-Enlightenment reform era were discussed as early as the 1820s. Rammohan Roy, the most influential actor in the Bengali engagement with the West, fused different traditions in his project of social reform that made him a proponent of a “religion of reason,” as Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling called him. 70 In the Ottoman Empire, the texts of the French philosophes emerged as an important point of reference in the 1830s, while the introduction of these classics into public debate had to wait until mid-century. As a result, Young Ottomans such as Namik Kemal legitimized their cause by referencing the works of Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. 71 In Egypt, Rifa al-Tahtawi was nominated in 1841 to head the translation bureau (Tercüme Odasi) and oversaw the publication of hundreds of European works in the Arabic language. 72 In 1870s Japan, the journal Meiroku zasshi introduced crucial new terms such as “rights,” “freedom,” and “economy” to a larger public, while Fukuzawa Yukichi's bestselling Conditions in the West discussed Western institutions, customs, and material culture. 73 In Qing China, Yan Fu emerged as the most prominent translator—of works by Thomas Huxley, Adam Smith, Herbert Spencer, Montesquieu, and others—since the 1890s. 74

As a consequence of this shifting chronology, debates did not always focus on the same issues. This was primarily because the local contexts in which the term was invoked changed considerably, from 1820s Bengal to 1890s Korea. Moreover, the reference itself changed, too. “Enlightenment” did not mean the same thing in the 1830s that it had in the eighteenth century, and by the 1880s its connotations had been further transformed. As Enlightenment ideas were articulated across the globe, they were gradually fused with other strands of thinking, some of which had originally been formulated against them. Particularly important was the impact of liberalism, of utilitarianism along the lines of John Stuart Mill, of Darwinian and Spencerian evolutionism, and of positivist philosophy as outlined by Comte, often popularized by global bestsellers such as Samuel Smiles's Self-Help , and the more specialized handbooks by authors such as Frédéric Bastiat and Henry Wheaton. As a result of this merging of vocabularies, the conceptual content of “Enlightenment” changed, too. The focus now was less on individual consciousness liberated from religious fetters and state oppression, and more on collective and national projects of technical and material improvement. By the 1880s, an unequivocal notion of material progress was firmly entrenched and had lost the sense of ambivalence, and of the possibility of nonlinear alternatives, that had still been present in the eighteenth century. And as paradoxical as it might seem, the inclusion and grafting of different strands of thought helped turn the many Enlightenments of the eighteenth century into the singular “hyperreal” Enlightenment of the 1880s. 75 It came to be embraced by a wide variety of actors. Many of them used the terms “Enlightenment” and “civilization” almost interchangeably; at times, they avoided both and merely employed a vocabulary of reform. In Japan, for example, the term keimō (“Enlightenment”) increasingly gave way to kaika , with its strong overtones of social evolutionism. 76

In the Ottoman Empire, reference to the tenets of the Enlightenment emerged as an important element of political discourse in the 1830s. From mid-century onward, Young Ottomans such as Namik Kemal (1840–1888) legitimized their cause by citing the works of Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, which were beginning to be translated. Consequently, Kemal was dubbed the “Voltaire … of this nation” by the Ottoman journalist Ebüzziya Revfik in 1903. However, Kemal drew on a variety of intellectual resources in his quest for social and political reform. As his response to Ernest Renan's indictment of Islamic religion in 1893 made abundantly clear, his version of Enlightenment was not a poor copy of French debates in the eighteenth century, but an original position responding to the exigencies of Ottoman society in the late nineteenth century.

The equivalence of civilization and Enlightenment points to the degree to which the latter had changed meaning; it was now primarily a gauge for the relative geopolitical position of a given nation in the global arena. This, to be sure, was not entirely new; thinking in stages was one of the ways in which eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers translated cultural difference into a language of progress. But while this idea coexisted with other notions of being “enlightened”—the progress of reason, the public sphere, secular world views—by the late nineteenth century, Enlightenment was increasingly inserted into a narrative of evolutionism and the advance of civilization. It was thus transformed from a process into a currency—some had more of it, and some needed tutors to give it to them. This was, by the way, also the case in Europe, where the culture wars that pitted liberal states against the churches were represented as a “great battle” between the light of the Enlightenment and the darkness of the papal Middle Ages, and where Enlightenment in the guise of the civilizing mission rhetoric and international law served as the ideological prop of imperialism. 77

To speak of Enlightenment was thus to think globally—and the urgency with which Enlightenment tenets were invoked was related to differentials of power. Characteristically, the connection between the local and the global was mediated by three fundamental ways in which the nineteenth-century world was transformed: the integration of the world economy, the emergence of a system of nation-states, and the consolidation of imperialism. These large processes established a global framework that seemed to imbue Enlightenment vocabulary with universal exchange value, and generated resonances between otherwise disparate locations. 79 They worked thus as enabling contexts and structured the way in which Enlightenment ideas were used. More importantly, the discourse of “Enlightenment” was employed as a means to negotiate these shifting moments and to come to terms with the challenges of living in a global world.

First, the emergence of a worldwide system of markets and capital accumulation not only synchronized nations around the world, but also made reforms aimed at the gradual incorporation of societies into capitalist structures seem a historical necessity. Many of the actors who formulated their goals in Enlightenment rhetoric were aiming to transform society under the auspices of liberalism and market integration. Calls for Enlightenment were frequently linked to demands for new forms of taxation and the introduction of the gold standard, for the liberalization of customs, the regime of free trade, and the opening of ports. Projects to enlighten the populace and to transform an idle population into a diligent workforce were thus also claims to participation in the global economy.

Second, the incorporation of nations into the international state system was accompanied by strategies of nation-building couched in Enlightenment terms. The great “reorganization” ( tanzimat ) of the Ottoman Empire after 1839, the activities of the “Independence Club” in Korea in 1896, and the Guangxu reforms in China in 1898 were all attempts to cluster various strands of reformist thinking into a comprehensive response to the deepening political and social crisis of the polity. Reformers typically used Enlightenment rhetoric in two ways. On the one hand, the new language was employed internally, in an effort to railroad the populace into “civilized” ways of comportment, participation, and work: the civilizing mission within. On the other hand, it was directed against the threat of colonization, one of the central concerns of nation-building. In 1897, King Chulalongkorn of Siam, one of the few non-colonized countries in Asia, took an extended trip to Europe so that he could see firsthand everything—from battleships and fire engines to botanical gardens and hospitals—that made societies “enlightened” and “civilized.” 80 In the Spanish colony of the Philippines, self-styled “Enlighteners” invoked the authority of reason and natural law in their nationalistic critique of Spanish rule and the influence of Spanish missionaries. In Java, Raden Ajeng Kartini, one of the few audible voices of women in the political public sphere in Asia, addressed two memoranda to the Dutch colonial government in 1903 in which she drew on Enlightenment principles to call for modern education and social emancipation for Javanese girls and women. 81

Third, invoking “Enlightenment” was part and parcel of strategies to position the country within the larger imperialist order. Enlightenment rhetoric, in other words, could be used as a tool of empire. For expansionist Japan, the cosmology of different stages of civilization and the differing chronologies of progress were crucial elements in justifying colonial forays into East Asia. In a famous essay, Fukuzawa Yukichi emphasized that “our country cannot afford to wait for the enlightenment of our neighbours and to co-operate in building Asia up. Rather, we should leave their ranks to join the camp of the civilized countries of the West [ datsua nyūo ].” Therefore, he famously concluded, Japan should treat China and Korea “as the Westerners do.” 82 This was nothing less than an explicit call for colonization.

King Chulalongkorn of Siam (Rama V, r. 1868–1910) continued the modernizing reforms that his father, King Mongkut, had initiated. After study tours to neighboring countries such as Dutch Java and the British colonies of Singapore, India, and Burma, he embarked on a trip to Europe in 1897 and “saw that there is more to do than there is time.” He meticulously noted the differences between England and Russia, Hungary and Switzerland (“similar to Java, but 100 times prettier”), Italy, Austria, and Portugal (“I have not seen a country worse than this”). His political and social reforms went beyond the introduction of Western technology and extended to the bureaucracy and the legal system, while his fusion of European ideas of just government with Theravada Buddhist concepts of kingship was to ensure his position of absolutist ruler and enlightened monarch at the same time. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C., LC-DIG-ggbain-05360.

In all of these cases, the notion of “Enlightenment” helped historical actors to think globally, and to make a complex world legible. In the face of local, regional, and global challenges, they articulated their claims with Enlightenment discourse not only because it was a lingua franca that promised to endow their ideas with universal validity, but also because “Enlightenment” had been transformed, not least through their efforts, into a language of global positioning. The term was thus employed in ways that departed from earlier usages—but it would be shortsighted to ignore this longer history. “Every reading by later generations of past conceptualizations alters the spectrum of possible transmitted meanings,” Reinhart Koselleck reminds us. “The original contexts of concepts change; so, too, do the original or subsequent meanings carried by concepts.” 83 This process is particularly salient from a global history perspective: the trajectory of “Enlightenment” and the various ways in which it is used need to be understood as part of its conceptual development.

G iven these fundamental transformations , whether this was more than a history of diffusion may by now appear to be a rhetorical question. But it is worth dwelling on it for a moment, as we need to recognize that conceptual change was not only the result of changing geopolitical contexts, and of European expansion in the Age of Imperialism. Instead, non-European actors increasingly took the lead in pronouncing claims to equality and to Enlightenment promises. 84 Rather than a process of diffusion, the longer history of Enlightenment was the result of its constant reinvention.

We may speak thus of the global co-production of Enlightenment knowledge. This process took many forms, but two mechanisms are of particular salience here. While the rhetoric of Enlightenment remained vested with the authority of European power, it was merged with other cultural traditions and increasingly detached from its sole association with Europe. First, the mixing and hybridization of intellectual resources was characteristic of any attempt to connect the assumed universalism of Enlightenment notions with the specificities of their local manifestation. This pattern was more pronounced in the Asian contexts of the nineteenth century, as endogenous intellectual resources had greater weight, autonomy, and staying power in Asia than in the Atlantic world. The merging with traditions owed also to the strategic need to plant radical visions on familiar terrain. Rammohan Roy's “version of enlightenment,” as C. A. Bayly has underlined, “embraced Hindu, Muslim and Western notions of virtue.” 85 And when Fukuzawa published his Introduction to the Countries of the World ( Sekai kunizukishi ) in 1869, he arranged it in metrical patterns to facilitate its being read in the manner of Buddhist catechisms. 86

In East Asia, one of the most frequent ingredients in this process, somewhat paradoxically, was Confucianism. Ostensibly relegating the Confucian heritage to the dustbin of history, ideas associated with the Enlightenment were instead fused with the existing cosmology—which in turn was refashioned under conditions of global interaction. In Japan, the term ri , which in Confucian thought denotes the principle that bestows order and harmony on human society, was used to express the idea of laissez-faire and the rationality of market exchange. 87 In China, the notion of progress was constructed by drawing both on neo-Confucianist discussions and on social Darwinist texts. 88 And Liu Shipei, intoxicated by his fascination with Rousseau, published his Essential Idea of the Chinese Social Contract in 1903, arguing that the essence of Rousseau's project could be found in the much older legacy of Confucianism. 89 As much as this was an ideological strategy to indigenize reformist concepts, it did affect the content of these concepts and enabled, for example, Enlightenment claims to be expressed in a language that was less reliant on an atomized individualism. Sometimes, conversely, Enlightenment rhetoric could help legitimate re-articulations of Confucian thinking in response to new global challenges. 90

Second, “enlightened” concepts were wrested from their sole attachment to Europe. Around 1900, reference to “Enlightenment” was already globalized to such an extent that Western Europe ceased to be the only location of authority. In Java, for example, Kartini legitimized her demand for women's emancipation not only with Dutch models, but also with the texts of the Indian feminist Pandita Ramabai. Liberal reforms in 1830s Bengal, on the other hand, were fueled by analogies with Ireland and Greece, and especially with the independence movements in Latin America. 91 At the end of the century, the most powerful point of reference was Japan. After the 1905 military victory over Russia, Japan emerged in many parts of the world—including Egypt, Siam, and the Ottoman Empire—as a privileged counterpoint that promised to provide Enlightenment and modernization without the imperialism and race ideology displayed by the “West.” 92

Japan also emerged as an important agent of intellectual innovation in Qing China. In the wake of the failed 1898 coup, Tokyo was a magnet for reform-minded Chinese. For many of them, the sojourn in Japan was perceived as a crucial turning point. “Books like I have never seen before dazzle my eyes. Ideas like I have never encountered before baffle my brain. It is like seeing the sun after being confined in a dark room,” confessed Liang Qichao, the most influential Chinese thinker of the turn of the century, who intended to transfer Japan's bunmei kaika to China in the form of a general “Enlightenment”: “I am like a different person.” 95 In the years to come, the ferment generated by this exchange would enable the production of new knowledges. Japanese teachers worked as consultants for the reform of the Chinese educational system. Liang founded a bureau of translation in Shanghai, and up to 1911, about 1,000 Japanese works were published in Chinese. Most importantly, Japanese neologisms were imported to China: “science” and “labor,” “nation” and “equality,” “society” and “capitalism” were among the hundreds of terms newly coined in Japan—by building in turn on classical Chinese characters. 96 The authority of forms of knowledge that were associated with Japan was immense; imitating Japan seemed to promise a shortcut to modernization in comparison to learning from the “West.” At the same time, cultural borrowing from Japan was legitimized as tapping into an already “Asianized”—and hence different—version of modernity, devoid of the kind of individualism bordering on the egotistical that many observers saw as prevalent in Europe. “Japan has certain advantages over the West,” Zhang Zhidong emphasized in 1898. “China and Japan share similar circumstances and customs, making it easier [for us] to copy from Japan.” 97

The result of these processes of mixing, and of expanding the range of models, was a transnational production of knowledge that cannot be reduced to a European genealogy. Social groups in Istanbul, Manila, and Shanghai literally made the Enlightenment; they were not merely on the receiving end of innovations conceived elsewhere a century earlier. Historians have tended to read the history of knowledge as a script that is written in one place and then adopted and adapted in another, influencing if not determining the thoughts and actions of the recipients. But the reverse trajectory is at least as important. Speaking “Enlightenment” in Seoul was a response to a specific situation in Korea in the 1890s, and not a belated answer to Voltaire.

T he E nlightenment was obsessed with the problem of origins. Surely this was not in itself original, as the search for origins has preoccupied intellectuals since the Age of Humanism. But at the end of the eighteenth century, the quest for origins took center stage and corresponded with the general trend toward historicizing science and philosophy. As biblical and divine authority no longer guaranteed absolute certainty, genealogy and attempts to trace all phenomena back to their earliest origins took its place. Even if the Enlightenment was defined by privileging rationality, future orientation, and progress—Ernst Cassirer was one of the first to point out this paradox—it was at the same time tied to the spirits of the past and the fascination with beginnings. “The specter of origins,” according to Pierre Saint-Amand, “is the skeleton in the closet of Enlightenment political philosophy, the evil spirit that haunts it, the ever-present threat of incompletion.” 98

Thus Condillac sought the origins of human knowledge, and Rousseau explored the origins of inequality. The quest for origins—and foundations—of law, of national consciousness, of religion, was an ongoing concern of scientific research, philosophical speculation, and erudite discussion. Winckelmann and later Schiller initiated the cult of antiquity, the Archimedean point of departure of European culture. Archaeology was complemented, in the wake of Napoleon and Champollion, by Egyptology. Colonial expansion extended the quest for origins—of Europe, of Man, of the modern—to the whole world: ethnographers searched for the “primitive peoples”; William Jones in Bengal inquired into the common origins of Greek and Sanskrit; linguists and anthropologists scrutinized the roots of the Indo-Germanic language and the Aryan origins of European civilization. Also beyond Europe, the quest for origins was a strategy to tap into this discourse: Hindu reformers in Bengal looked for the oldest available texts in order to define the cultural foundations of India, and José Rizal in the Philippines constructed a precolonial “Golden Age” whose accomplishments dwarfed European civilization.

Not only was this fetishization of the origin part of Enlightenment discourse; it has been at the core of metanarratives about the Enlightenment ever since. Attempts to situate the Enlightenment in world history, in particular, have operated within the framework of a history of origins. Historians have looked for the emergence of what they saw as the core of the Enlightenment—in substance, in space, and in time—and have tended to read its further history as one of gradual diffusion, if not dilution. Typically, this was a history in which eighteenth-century Europe served as the point of origin, and the rest of the world was but the site of a derivative discourse. 99

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, however, was not the intellectual monopoly of Europeans. It needs to be understood as a result of the transnational co-production of knowledge by many contributors around the world. This is not to deny that particular debates were also deeply embedded in European traditions, and were shaped by specific situations in places such as Edinburgh, Halle, and Naples. But the intellectual dynamic as well as the revolutionary impact of the transformations of the late eighteenth century was very much energized by global conditions.

Moreover, the Enlightenment was not confined to its Atlantic moment in the eighteenth century; it had a much longer course. This was a history not so much of its diffusion as of its permanent reinvention. Groups and social milieus that pressed for social and cultural change invoked the authority of the Enlightenment while fusing it with other traditions. In the process, what was seen as the core of the Enlightenment changed profoundly, both because of the creative merging of elements from a variety of cultural backgrounds, and because these ideas were proposed in geopolitical contexts that differed greatly from eighteenth-century Europe. Increasingly, Enlightenment was employed as a concept that allowed historical actors to think globally and to position their communities on a world stage.

This requires a rethinking of the spatiality and temporality of the global Enlightenment. Its history was shaped more by the specific constellations in the locations in which it was invoked than by the texts of European sages. To be sure, the gradual translation and circulation of their writings, and of vulgarized handbooks, did have an impact and was discussed in places as distant as Chile and Vietnam. But even more important than this centrifugal dissemination was the use to which it was put: elites in Calcutta, Lima, and Tokyo invoked Enlightenment ideas for purposes and claims of their own—and thus transformed the connotations of the concepts. In spatial terms, then, the globality of the Enlightenment cannot be explained simply as emanation from a center. Its temporality also needs to be rethought, as it was determined not by origins and continuities, but rather by simultaneity and conjunctures. Eighteenth-century Paris, in other words, was not the model and 1900s Shanghai the sequel. Elites in late Qing China were shaped by forces and concerns of their own time, and the way in which the philosophes were translated, cited, and hijacked was structured by these conditions.

An assessment of the Enlightenment in global history, therefore, should not be concerned primarily with origins, either geographically or temporally. Instead, the focus needs to be on moments of articulation and invention, and these moments need to be understood in their constellations of global synchronicity. On its most general level, the dynamic of appropriation was conditioned and mediated by the geopolitical order of the world and the capitalist integration of the globe in an age of imperialism. Under these conditions, ideas that were (sometimes strategically) associated with Europe were taken up by different actors, and they were connected to other bodies of cultural practice and thought.

Ultimately, however, it was only this process of global circulation, translation, and transnational co-production that turned the Enlightenment into the general and universal phenomenon that it had always purported to be. The discourse of eighteenth-century Europe relied on a language of universal claims and worldwide validity. But to make these claims valid in practice, and indeed to convince—and frequently force—people around the world to accept their claims, more was needed than the allegedly inherent power of reason. This implementation was the work of many different actors, influenced by geopolitics and the uneven distribution of power, fed by high hopes and utopian promises, by threats and violence. 100 Only this complex and nonlinear process of global actualization was able to render the universalist claims of the Enlightenment ubiquitous—and in this restricted sense universal.

I am grateful to Arif Dirlik, Andreas Eckert, Harald Fischer-Tiné, Sheldon Garon, Stephen Kotkin, Stefan Rinke, Antonella Romano, Martin van Gelderen, Eric Weitz, and the anonymous reviewers for the AHR for helpful and stimulating comments on earlier versions of this article. I am particularly indebted to Christopher L. Hill and Gagan Sood for several rounds of very constructive criticism, and to Rob Schneider for a set of final clarifications. This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (AKS-2012-DZZ-3103).

1 Toby E. Huff, Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2010), 4.

2 Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter, eds., Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe , vol. I/17: Wissenschaft als Beruf 1917/1919 / Politik als Beruf 1919 (Tübingen, 1992), 9.

3 William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago, 1963), 599.

4 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” in James Schmidt, ed., What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley, Calif., 1996), 58–64. See also the monumental Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment , ed. Alan Charles Kors (Oxford, 2002).

5 Douglas R. Howland, Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Honolulu, 2002), 40–42.

6 Kant, “An Answer to the Question,” quotes from 59, 58; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 44.

7 For standard accounts of the Enlightenment, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation , 2 vols. (New York, 1966–1969); Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995); Hugh Trevor-Roper, History and the Enlightenment (New Haven, Conn., 2010); John W. Yolton, Pat Rogers, Roy Porter, and Barbara Stafford, eds., The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1992).

8 Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore , 5 vols. (Turin, 1966–1990); Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, eds., The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1982).

9 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion , 5 vols. (Cambridge, 1999–2011).

10 Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001); Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford, 2008).

11 Outram, The Enlightenment ; Robert Darnton, “The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary France,” Past and Present 51 (May 1971): 81–115; Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996); Barbara Taylor and Sarah Knott, eds., Women, Gender and Enlightenment (New York, 2005); Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca, N.Y., 2009).

12 J. G. A. Pocock, “The Re-Description of Enlightenment,” Proceedings of the British Academy 125 (2004): 101–117; Robert E. Norton, “The Myth of the Counter-Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 4 (2007): 635–658.

13 David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, N.J., 2008); Jonathan Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay,” American Historical Review 108, no. 4 (October 2003): 1061–1080.

14 Michael Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 692–716. For a recent overview of the multifaceted approaches, see Karen O'Brien, “The Return of the Enlightenment,” American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (December 2010): 1426–1435.

15 In particular, Jonathan Israel, and John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005). Note that each author opts for a very different Enlightenment: for Israel, the “real” Enlightenment is over by the 1740s, while for Robertson it only begins then.

16 Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1995). See also Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment ; Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization.”

17 Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001), 11.

18 Judith N. Shklar, “Politics and the Intellect,” in Stanley Hoffmann, ed., Political Thought and Political Thinkers (Chicago, 1998), 94–104, here 94.

19 Such a history could easily be extended into the twentieth century—and into our present—when Marxists, dialecticians of the Enlightenment, postmodernists, and self-styled warriors in the “clash of civilizations” continued to appropriate, and redefine, “the Enlightenment” for their own purposes. For attempts to take stock, see Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hans Reill, eds., What's Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Stanford, Calif., 2001); Schmidt, What Is Enlightenment? ; Graeme Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (London, 2005). I will also bracket the strands of anti-Enlightenment thinking, from Edmund Burke, Nietzsche, and Adorno to Gandhi and Kita Ikki, and concentrate on the moments in which “Enlightenment” was invoked as a positive resource. For these other trends, see Tetsuo Najita and H. D. Harootunian, “Japan's Revolt against the West,” in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ed., Modern Japanese Thought (Cambridge, 1998), 207–272; Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2009).

20 Outram, The Enlightenment , 8.

21 For example, Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York, 2004); Tzvetan Todorov, In Defence of the Enlightenment (London, 2009); Louis Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (Chicago, 2004); John M. Headley, The Europeanization of the World: On the Origins of Human Rights and Democracy (Princeton, N.J., 2008); Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (New York, 2004); Robert B. Louden, The World We Want: How and Why the Ideals of the Enlightenment Still Elude Us (Oxford, 2007).

22 See, for example, Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East and West (Oxford, 2008).

23 Jürgen Osterhammel, “Welten des Kolonialismus im Zeitalter der Aufklärung,” in Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, ed., Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische koloniale Welt (Göttingen, 2006), 19–36, quote from 19.

24 Ashis Nandy, “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance,” in Veena Das, ed., Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia (Delhi, 1990), 90.

25 See Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London, 1990).

26 On this issue, see Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1993); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass., 1999). See also the contributions in Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, eds., The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (Oxford, 2009).

27 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe , 43.

28 See Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, N.J., 2003); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, N.J., 2006); Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1998).

29 Early Modernities , Special Issue, Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998).

30 Robert N. Bellah, Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan (New York, 1957), 2.

31 Peter Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760–1840 (Austin, Tex., 1979).

32 Reinhard Schulze, “Was ist die islamische Aufklärung?,” Die Welt des Islams 36, no. 3 (1996): 276–325, here 309. See also Schulze, “Islam und andere Religionen in der Aufklärung,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 7 (2008): 317–340.

33 Mark Elvin, “Vale atque ave,” in K. G. Robinson, ed., Joseph Needham: Science and Civilisation in China , vol. 7: The Social Background , pt. 2: General Conclusions and Reflections (Cambridge, 2004), xliv–xliii, here xl. See also the debate about the emergence of a “public sphere” in Qing China; e.g., Frederic Wakeman, “Boundaries of the Public Sphere in Ming and Qing China,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998): 167–190.

34 Joel Mokyr, “The Great Synergy: The European Enlightenment as a Factor in Modern Economic Growth,” in Wilfred Dolfsma and Luc Soete, eds., Understanding the Dynamics of a Knowledge Economy (Cheltenham, 2006), 7–41.

35 On multiple modernities, see Multiple Modernities , Special Issue, Daedalus 129, no. 1 (2000); Dominic Sachsenmaier and Jens Riedel with Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, eds., Reflections on Multiple Modernities: European, Chinese, and Other Interpretations (Leiden, 2002).

36 Sheldon Pollock, “Pretextures of Time,” History and Theory 46, no. 3 (2007): 366–383, quote from 380. This is true even for one of the most fascinating examples of recent scholarship, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600–1800 (Delhi, 2001), by Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. The authors mine a variety of genres to locate history-writing in the South Asian tradition and thus refute the standard assumption that in the Indian context, a historical consciousness arrived only with the British. Theirs is an exemplary work of philological scholarship and intellectual vision, and it vividly demonstrates the complexity and dynamics of South Indian societies before 1800. At times, however, the authors do not refrain from inserting this new sense of history into the familiar language of individualization, rationalization, secularization, and “the arrival of a certain kind of ‘modernity’ in the far south” (264). It should be noted that some contributions to the debate on “early modernities” do not embrace the teleological outlook that seems inherent in its label. A good overview on the debate can be found in Lynn A. Struve, ed., The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).

37 Victor B. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830 , 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2003–2004). See also Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge, 2006), 118–121; Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many? (Cambridge, 2009).

38 For a critique, see Arif Dirlik, Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, Colo., 2007); Timothy Mitchell, “Introduction,” in Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis, 2000), xi–xvii.

39 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400–1750,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998): 75–104, here 99–100.

40 See James E. Vance, Jr., Capturing the Horizon: The Historical Geography of Transportation since the Sixteenth Century (Baltimore, 1990); Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton, N.J., 2011); Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens ; Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World around It (London, 2004).

41 See C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989); David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (New York, 2009); C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford, 2004); Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 2009).

42 Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnology (London, 2007); Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, Conn., 1994).

43 D. E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham, Md., 1999); Jonathan D. Spence, The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York, 1999); Julia Ching and Willard Gurdon Oxtoby, eds., Discovering China: European Interpretations in the Enlightenment (Rochester, N.Y., 1992); Osterhammel, Die Entzauberung Asiens , 271–348; J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought (London, 1997). See also Humberto Garcia, Islam and the English Enlightenment, 1670–1840 (Baltimore, 2012).

44 Representative works of this vast literature include Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler, eds., Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains (Berkeley, Calif., 1995); Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni, eds., The Anthropology of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif., 2007); Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2009); István Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 2005); Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard's “Religious Ceremonies of the World” (Cambridge, Mass, 2010); Karen O'Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge, 1997); Hans Erich Bödeker, Clorinda Donato, and Peter Hanns Reill, eds., Discourses of Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Enlightenment (Toronto, 2009); William Max Nelson, “Making Men: Enlightenment Ideas of Racial Engineering,” American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (December 2010): 1364–1394; Franz Leander Fillafer and Jürgen Osterhammel, “Cosmopolitanism and the German Enlightenment,” in Helmut Walser Smith, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011), 119–143.

45 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif., 1994); Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997).

46 Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (2000): 821–865.

47 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, Calif., 2001), 266.

48 See Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1995); John Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge, 1994); Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, Conn., 2000); David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, eds., Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago, 1999); Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan, eds., Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800 (Stanford, Calif., 2009).

49 See John Gascoigne, The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia (Cambridge, 2005); Gordon T. Stewart, Journey to Empire: Enlightenment, Imperialism, and the British Encounter with Tibet, 1774–1904 (Cambridge, 2009); Grant K. Goodman, Japan and the Dutch, 1600–1853 (Richmond, 2000).

50 Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Delhi, 2006), 223.

51 Ibid. For similar arguments, see Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib, Domesticating Modern Science: A Social History of Science and Culture in Colonial India (New Delhi, 2004); Thomas R. Trautmann, Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras (New Delhi, 2006).

52 David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), 1. See also Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano, eds., The Atlantic Enlightenment (Hampshire, 2008); Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976); Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992); Robert A. Ferguson, The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Charles W. J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago, 2007).

53 Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World . See also Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago, 2008); and for an early statement, Edmundo O'Gorman, El proceso de la invención de América (Mexico City, 1958). For the imperial and Atlantic contexts, see Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (April 2008): 319–340; J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, Conn., 2006); A. Owen Aldridge, ed., The Ibero-American Enlightenment (Urbana, Ill., 1971); Renan Silva, Los ilustrados de Nueva Granada, 1760–1808: Genealogía de una comunidad de interpretación (Medellín, 2002).

54 Dror Ze'evi, “Back to Napoleon? Thoughts on the Beginning of the Modern Era in the Middle East,” Mediterranean Historical Review 19, no. 1 (2004): 73–94. See also Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley, Calif., 2002); Juan Cole, Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York, 2007); Irene A. Bierman, ed., Napoleon in Egypt (Reading, 2003).

55 Kate Brittlebank, Tipu Sultan's Search for Legitimacy: Islam and Kingship in a Hindu Domain (Delhi, 1997), chap. 5.

56 Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), 4–5.

57 Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).

58 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2001); Laurent Dubois and Julius S. Scott, eds., Origins of the Black Atlantic (New York, 2009).

59 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995), 82.

60 See most explicitly Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville, Va., 2008).

61 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938; repr., New York, 1963), 25. The claim has been disputed by Louis Sala-Molins, Les misères des Lumières: Sous la raison, l'outrage (Paris, 1992); but see also Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, N.C., 1999); Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History 31, no. 1 (2006): 1–14.

62 See David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, Ind., 1997); John K. Thornton, “‘I Am the Subject of the King of Kongo’: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4, no. 2 (1993): 181–214; Bernard Camier and Laurent Dubois, “Voltaire et Zaire, ou le théâtre des Lumières dans l'aire atlantique française,” Revue d'histoire moderne & contemporaine 54, no. 4 (2007): 39–69.

63 David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, S.C., 2001); Sybille Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, N.C., 2004); Doris L. Garraway, ed., Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Charlottesville, Va., 2008).

64 Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715 (Paris, 1935); Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam, 1947). See also Schmidt, What Is Enlightenment?

65 For stimulating works that project intellectual history into a global context, see Christopher L. Hill, National History and the World of Nations: Capital, State, and the Rhetoric of History in Japan, France, and the United States (Durham, N.C., 2008); and Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago, 2008). See also Carol Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, eds., Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon (Durham, N.C., 2009).

66 Frederick Cooper, “Modernity,” in Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, Calif., 2005), 113–149, here 115.

67 Cited in Albert M. Craig, Civilization and Enlightenment: The Early Thought of Fukuzawa Yukichi (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), 147.

68 Cited in William Reynolds Braisted, ed., Meiroku Zasshi: Journal of the Japanese Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 39.

69 For the fusion of internal and external crises, see Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “World History in a Global Age,” American Historical Review 100, no. 4 (October 1995): 1034–1060.

70 Schelling cited in Bruce Carlisle Robertson, Raja Rammohan Roy: The Father of Modern India (Delhi, 1995), 71. See also David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773–1835 (Berkeley, Calif., 1969); Lynn Zastoupil, Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain (Basingstoke, 2010); C. A. Bayly, “Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India, 1800–30,” Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 1 (2007): 25–41. For the 1840s and 1850s, see also Brian A. Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement: Vidyāsāgar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal (Calcutta, 1996).

71 Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Arab Rediscovery of Europe: A Study in Cultural Encounters (Princeton, N.J., 1963); Christoph Herzog, “Aufklärung und Osmanisches Reich: Annäherung an ein historiographisches Problem,” in Wolfgang Hardtwig, ed., Die Aufklärung und ihre Weltwirkung (Göttingen, 2010), 291–321; Dagmar Glass, Der Muqtataf und seine Öffentlichkeit: Aufklärung, Räsonnement und Meinungsstreit in der frühen arabischen Zeitschriftenkommunikation , 2 vols. (Würzburg, 2004).

72 Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (Cambridge, 1983); Roxanne L. Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge (Princeton, N.J., 2006).

73 Braisted, Meiroku Zasshi ; Carmen Blacker, The Japanese Enlightenment: A Study of the Writings of Fukuzawa Yukichi (Cambridge, 1964).

74 Benjamin I. Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).

75 In this use of the term “hyperreal,” I follow Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe .

76 Alistair Swale, The Political Thought of Mori Arinori: A Study in Meiji Conservatism (Richmond, 2000); Howland, Translating the West , 40–42.

77 See Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, eds., Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2003); Bruce Mazlish, Civilization and Its Contents (Stanford, Calif., 2004); Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge, 2001).

78 Cited in Andre Schmid, Korea between Empires, 1895–1919 (New York, 2002), 83.

79 Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York, 1984), 147, speaks of “two interdependent master processes,” to which we must add imperialism as the hegemonic mode of interaction.

80 Niels P. Petersson, “König Chulalongkorns Europareise 1897: Europäischer Imperialismus, symbolische Politik und monarchisch-bürokratische Modernisierung,” Saeculum 52, pt. 2 (2001): 297–328.

81 Barbara N. Ramusack, “Women and Gender in South and Southeast Asia,” in Bonnie G. Smith, ed., Women's History in Global Perspective , 3 vols. (Urbana, Ill., 2005), 2: 101–138.

82 Fukuzawa Yukichi, “On De-Asianization,” in Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, comp., Meiji Japan through Contemporary Sources , 3 vols., vol. 3: 1869–1894 (Tokyo, 1972), 133.

83 Reinhart Koselleck, “A Response to Comments on the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe,” in Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter, eds., The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts: New Studies on Begriffsgeschichte (Washington, D.C., 1996), 59–70, quote from 62.

84 Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (1882–1945) (New York, 2007).

85 Bayly, “Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India,” 29.

86 Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 460–461.

87 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, A History of Japanese Economic Thought (London, 1989), 29.

88 A good overview of intellectual trends in China can be gleaned from Charlotte Furth, “Intellectual Change: From the Reform Movement to the May Fourth Movement, 1895–1920,” in Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-Fan Lee, eds., An Intellectual History of Modern China (Cambridge, 2002), 13–96. Usually, the term “Chinese Enlightenment” is reserved for the May Fourth movement of 1919. See Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley, Calif., 1986).

89 Xiaoling Wang, “Liu Shipei et son concept de contrat social chinois,” Études chinoises 27, no. 1–2 (1998): 155–190; Hao Chang, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning, 1890–1911 (Berkeley, Calif., 1987).

90 See Viren Murthy, “Modernity against Modernity: Wang Hui's Critical History of Chinese Thought,” Modern Intellectual History 3 (2006): 137–165; Ban Wang, “Discovering Enlightenment in Chinese History: The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought , by Wang Hui,” boundary 2 34, no. 2 (2007): 217–238.

91 Bayly, “Rammohan Roy and the Advent of Constitutional Liberalism in India.”

92 Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia .

93 Cited in Schmid, Korea between Empires , 90.

94 Ibid., 110–111; Lee Sang-Ik, “On the Concepts of ‘New Korea’ Envisioned by Enlightenment Reformers,” Korea Journal 40, no. 2 (2000): 34–64; Shin Yong-ha, “The Thought of the Enlightenment Movement,” Korea Journal 24, no. 12 (1984): 4–21.

95 Cited in Douglas R. Reynolds, “A Golden Decade Forgotten: Japan-China Relations, 1898–1907,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 4, no. 2 (1987): 93–153, quote from 116. See also Reynolds, China, 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); Paula Harrell, Sowing the Seeds of Change: Chinese Students, Japanese Teachers, 1895–1905 (Stanford, Calif., 1992). Specifically on Liang and his transnational agenda, see Xiaobing Tang, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford, Calif., 1996); Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao's Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China (Berkeley, Calif., 2004).

96 See Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif., 1995).

97 Cited in Reynolds, “A Golden Decade Forgotten,” 113. For an instructive case study, see Joan Judge, “The Ideology of ‘Good Wives and Wise Mothers’: Meiji Japan and Feminine Modernity in Late-Qing China,” in Joshua A. Fogel, ed., Sagacious Monks and Bloodthirsty Warriors: Chinese Views of Japan in the Ming-Qing Period (Norwalk, Conn., 2002), 218–248.

98 Pierre Saint-Amand, “Hostile Enlightenment,” in Jean-Joseph Goux and Philip R. Wood, eds., Terror and Consensus: Vicissitudes of French Thought (Stanford, Calif., 1998), 145–158, quote from 145.

99 On the notion of derivative discourse, see Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis, 1986). The internalist view of European history is widespread. One of its most vociferous proponents is David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York, 1998).

100 Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe .

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Enlightenment Period and Jean-Jacques Rousseau Essay

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Introduction

The enlightenment period also popularly referred to as the age of reason denotes an explosive era in human history stretching from around the year 1600 to the year 1800; a period in which the West experienced great contributions and changes in its history. This period barely stretched over duration of two centuries, yet within such a brief period, what is now referred to as the modern era was inaugurated. Theological considerations that had previously dominated the intellectual of Western civilization between Augustine and the Reformation were radically and permanently disrupted by the enlightenment, giving rise to a completely new course for scientific thought and action. In the course of the enlightenment, people were able to break away from medieval mentality by adapting a completely new understanding of the human being. During this era, humans replaced God on the historical arena and human reason replaced divine revelation as a more reliable path in seeking the truth. A philosophical revolution that had begun with Rene Descartes, John Locke and other philosophers between 1596 and 1650, brought together enlightenment scientists, theologians and philosophers alike, in a combined effort to devise systems that would approximate or lead to the truth. During this age of reason, the church lost its earlier dominance in Western culture as enlightenment thinkers sought for better and more sensible foundations that would replace traditional authority and religious belief as the bases for political order and social morality (Grenz 60-63, p. 70).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

One of the most famous enlightenment philosophers who made tremendous contribution to society during this period is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 -1778). Rousseau is famed for making popular contributions to political and social theory through a famous essay, The Social Contract , which he wrote in 1762, and in which he addressed fundamental questions of political legitimacy and social justice. Other famous works of his are The New Heloise novel written in 1761, Emile , an educational theory book in 1762, and an extraordinarily influential and very original autobiography, The Confessions (1764-1770) among other works touching on music, language, botany to name but a few. Because of such a large and wide range of output, Rousseau received an enormous, though very controversial reputation during his time, and his ideas have continued to powerfully impact on society ever since. His life story is dotted with remarkable events such as the death of his mother soon after his birth, his relationship with a much older woman, and his life in the fashionable Paris society where his opera performances became a source of enlightenment for leading thinkers living during the enlightenment era (Dent 1-2, 8, p. 10).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is well known for formulating the popular sovereignty theory, as a radical response towards the inequalities, social conflicts, and divisions that were a common characteristic of Western society. The sovereignity theory subsequently led to the disfiguration of European societies and states during the 18 th century. Like his earlier counterparts, Rousseau tried to resolve a long-running and deep-seated problem that had characterized Western political theories; the problem that revolved around the continuous tension between the craving for individual freedom, and an autonomous need for collective authority and social order. Through his theory of social contract, Rousseau attempted to make a reconciliation between liberty and order by proposing that sovereign power be conferred to the larger community rather than concentrating power on the state as proposed by Thomas Hobbes, or the strong representative assembly proposed by John Locke. According to Rousseau the state was a non-sovereign executor of the decisions made by a sovereign community (Jones, p. 25).

Rousseau proposed that the state was supposed to be a tool for expressing the general will of its citizens. Unlike other enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire and Montesquieu who advocated for constitutional checks and other balance for state sovereignty, Rousseau was strongly in favor of radical rather than complete transformation of the political and social order with the utmost goal of creating a system of government founded upon liberty, popular sovereignty and equality. Through his concept of general will, Rousseau supposed that individuals should willingly surrender their rights to their respective communities rather than yield to the state; and that the legislative authority should be a community organ that every individual is subjected to while at the same time participating in the lawmaking process. Equality in society was one of his most favored ideals. His ideal state comprised of interdependent equals who according to Rousseau were supposed to be politically and economically independent (Jones, pp. 27-29).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau made great contributions to society through his works addressing political and social themes, language and music, religion and war, botany, education, novel, prose and poetry as well as his autobiographical works, self-explanation and disclosure (Dent, p. 21). His works radically criticized both modern European society and the enlightenment culture as well, including the philosophies that proposed it. Despite several attempts especially during the 20 th century to distribute his works among various academic disciplines, Rousseau had a very clear imagination that united his philosophical, pedagogical, historical, political and literary writings and strongly affirmed the relationship between his works and the suffering human being. His ideas led to fundamental changes to political culture especially in the period preceding the French Revolution (Porter, p. 9).

Eleven years after the death of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, his political philosophy especially his general will and popular sovereignty concepts became major inspirations for revolutionaries during the 1789 French Revolution. Over the span of centuries, his intellectual legacy has had a long-term influence upon socialist, liberalist, anarchist, democratic and to some extent totalitarian schools of thought (Jones 25). Though for many centuries Rousseau has also widely been blamed for many things, his contributions to literature and political theory have tremendously helped to bring change to modern culture and life. His works have invited emulation from prospective writers, and also created a romantic movement in literary writing, that has persisted to modern times (Porter, pp. 12-13).

Enduring legacy, political implications and contributions of the enlightenment period

Since the enlightenment, individual choices and actions of ordinary individuals have overtaken political control in determining the general well-being of human beings. Through the dramatic changes that occurred in societies during the enlightenment, human beings have inherited a heritage of scientific experiment and rationalism. But enlightenment’s most enduring legacy has been the co-ordination of those forces that exist beyond reasonable planning and organization in an attempt to improve the well-being of human beings. For individual choice to produce stability in society, the enlightenment philosophers had to clearly explain how institutions such as marriage, family, sexual morality and parenthood could be sustained without divine retribution or threats of subsequent legal punishment (Jordan, p. 127).

It was only in the enlightenment period of the 18 th century that the scientific discipline gained a cultural significance in Western society than at any other time in history. During this time, science began to build up recognition as the core intellectual system that other systems were supposed to refer to. Scientific knowledge may have existed earlier than this period but the enlightenment philosophers have received credit for helping to establish the scientific discipline in the Western culture during the 18 th Century. The enlightenment has also been referred to as the age of pedagogy during which a more intellectual system of transmitting knowledge to coming generations was discovered in a way that had not existed before. Rousseau’s work, Emile for example, displays a new system of learning that helped to stimulate a kind of curiosity that would make people more independent and critical towards an already established belief system. Enlightenment also witnessed the coming to birth of the famous encyclopedia system of classifying knowledge into various comprehensive disciplines such as natural history, languages, history as well as other particular disciplines. But the most famed technology during this period is the printing press, the new human invention that enabled the processing of new ides into readable material that was subsequently distributed worldwide in large quantities (Fitzpatrick 10, 217-219, 350, 366).

The enlightenment theory of societies constructed out of individual choices of the ordinary people, has over the centuries given rise to principles such as autonomy, individual liberty and mobility. These individual choices have given rise to reformed institutions within social-service organizations (Jordan 147-153). Also closely linked with the age of reason or enlightenment period is the birth of republicanism especially in countries such as France, Britain and America. France and America went through revolutions while Britain experienced a reform movement. The concept of liberty became a very common political feature during this period. Feminism also began during this period when enlightenment thinkers began addressing women’s role in history, their nature, sexual difference and the aspect of women’s intellectual equality with their male counterparts. Contributions to historical writing were tremendous during this period and the enlightenment is said to have paved way for the incorporation of history into university education (Fitzpatrick 207, 457,621).

Under the illumination of reason, society went through tremendous cultural and social transformation during the enlightenment period, giving rise to very intense and long lasting effects that saw the birth of modern Western society. The enlightenment has indeed made an enduring legacy on the socio-political of many nations all over the world (Grenz 61, 71; Jordan 127).

Works Cited

• Dent, N.J.H. Rousseau. London: Routledge, 2005.
• Fitzpatrick, Martin. The Enlightenment World . London: Routledge, 2004.
• Grenz, Stanley J. A Premier on Postmodernism . Grand Rapids: Wm.B.Eerdmans Publishing, 1996.
• Jones, Tudor. Modern Political Thinkers and Ideas: An Historical Introduction . London: Routledge, 2002.
• Jordan, Bill. Social Policy for the Twenty-First Century: New Perspectives, Big Issues. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
• Porter, Dennis. Rousseau’s Legacy: Emergence and Eclipse of the Writer in France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
• The Theory of Justice Need a Theory of Citizenship
• Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha and Swaraj Concepts
• Film Discussion: “Diva” by Jean-Jacques Beineix
• Philosophy: Justice Through Two Lenses
• Compromised Principles Discussion
• Equality or Priority in the Ideal of Equality
• Rousseau’s the Social Contract vs. Martin Luther King
• Political Science: Aristotle's View on Human Nature
• Philosophy: Is Patriotism a Virtue?
• John Locke and Thomas Hobbes: How Men Ought to Be Ruled
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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IvyPanda . 2021. "Enlightenment Period and Jean-Jacques Rousseau." October 19, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/enlightenment-period-and-jean-jacques-rousseau/.

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