How did the Enlightenment emerge, and what were major
currents of Enlightenment thought?
The political, intellectual, and religious developments of the early modern period that gave rise
to the Scientific Revolution further contributed to a series of debates about key issues in
late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and the wider world that came to be known as
the Enlightenment. By shattering the unity of Western Christendom, the conflicts of the
Reformation brought old religious certainties into question; the strong states that emerged to
quell the disorder soon inspired questions about political sovereignty and its limits. Increased
movement of peoples, goods, and ideas within and among the continents of Asia, Africa,
Europe, and America offered examples of surprisingly different ways of life and patterns of
thought. Finally, the tremendous achievements of the Scientific Revolution inspired intellectuals
to believe that true answers to all the questions being asked could be found through the use of
reason and critical thinking. Nothing was to be accepted on faith; everything was to be
submitted to rationalism, a secular, critical way of thinking. In a characteristically optimistic spirit,
Enlightenment thinkers embraced the belief that fundamental progress could be made in human
society as well as science.
The Early Enlightenment
Loosely united by certain key ideas, the European Enlightenment (ca. 1690–1789) was a broad
intellectual and cultural movement that gained strength gradually and did not reach its maturity
until about 1750. Its origins in the late seventeenth century lie in a combination of
developments, including political opposition to absolutist rule; religious conflicts between
Protestants and Catholics and within Protestantism; European contacts with other cultures; and
the attempt to apply principles and practices from the Scientific Revolution to improve living
conditions in human society.
A key crucible for Enlightenment thought was the Dutch Republic, with its traditions of religious
tolerance and republican rule. When Louis XIV demanded that all Protestants convert to
Catholicism, around two hundred thousand French Protestants, or Huguenots, fled France,
many destined for the Dutch Republic. From this haven of tolerance, Huguenots and their
supporters began to publish tracts denouncing religious intolerance and suggesting that only a
despotic monarch, not a legitimate ruler, would deny religious freedom. Their challenge to
authority thus combined religious and political issues.
These dual concerns drove the career of one important early Enlightenment writer, Pierre Bayle
(1647–1706), a Huguenot who took refuge in the Dutch Republic. Bayle critically examined the
religious beliefs and persecutions of the past in his Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697).
Demonstrating that human beliefs had been extremely varied and very often mistaken, he
concluded that nothing can ever be known beyond all doubt, a view known as skepticism. His
influential Dictionary was found in more private libraries of eighteenth-century France than any
other book.
The Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was another key figure in the
transition from the Scientific Revolution to the Enlightenment. Deeply inspired by advances in
science — in particular by debates about Descartes’s thought — Spinoza sought to apply
natural philosophy to thinking about human society. He borrowed Descartes’s emphasis on
rationalism and his methods of deductive reasoning, but he rejected the French thinker’s
mind-body dualism. Instead, Spinoza came to espouse monism, the idea that mind and body
were united in one substance and that God and nature were merely two names for the same
thing. He envisioned a deterministic universe in which good and evil were merely relative values
and human actions were shaped by outside circumstances, not free will. Spinoza was
excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam for his controversial religious ideas,
but he was heralded by his Enlightenment successors as a model of personal virtue and
courageous intellectual autonomy.
The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716), who
had developed calculus independently of Isaac Newton, refuted both Cartesian dualism and
Spinoza’s monism. Instead, he adopted the idea of an infinite number of substances, or
“monads,” from which all matter is composed. His Theodicy (1710) declared that ours must be
“the best of all possible worlds” because it was created by an omnipotent and benevolent God.
Leibniz’s optimism was later ridiculed by the French philosopher Voltaire in Candide, or
Optimism (1759).
Out of this period of intellectual turmoil came John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690), perhaps the most important text of the early Enlightenment. In this work
Locke (1632–1704), a physician and member of the Royal Society, set forth a new theory about
how human beings learn and form their ideas. Whereas Descartes based his deductive logic on
the conviction that certain first principles, or innate ideas, are imbued in humans by God, Locke
insisted that all ideas are derived from experience. The human mind at birth is like a blank
tablet, or tabula rasa, on which understanding and beliefs are inscribed by experience. Human
development is therefore determined by external forces, like education and social institutions,
not innate characteristics. Locke’s essay contributed to the theory of sensationalism, the idea
that all human ideas and thoughts are produced as a result of sensory impressions.
Along with Newton’s Principia, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding was one of the
great intellectual inspirations of the Enlightenment. Locke’s equally important contribution to
political theory, Two Treatises of Government (1690), insisted on the sovereignty of the
Parliament against the authority of the Crown (see “Constitutional Monarchy” in Chapter 5).
The Influence of the Philosophes
Divergences among the early thinkers of the Enlightenment show that, while they shared many
of the same premises and questions, the answers they found differed widely. The spread of this
spirit of inquiry owed a great deal to the work of the philosophes (fee-luh-ZAWFZ) (French for
“philosopher”), a group of French intellectuals who proudly proclaimed that they were bringing
the light of reason to their ignorant fellow humans.
In the mid-eighteenth century France became a hub of Enlightenment thought, for at least three
reasons. First, French was the international language of the educated classes, and France was
the wealthiest and most populous country in Europe. Second, the rising unpopularity of the
French monarchy generated growing discontent and calls for reform among the educated elite.
Third, the French philosophes made it their goal to reach a larger audience of elites, many of
whom were joined together in a concept inherited from the Renaissance known as the Republic
of Letters — an imagined transnational realm in which critical thinkers and writers participated.
To appeal to the public and get around the censors, the philosophes wrote novels and plays,
histories and philosophies, and dictionaries and encyclopedias, all filled with satire and double
meanings to spread their message. One of the greatest philosophes, the baron de Montesquieu
(mahn-tuhs-KYOO) (1689–1755), pioneered this approach in The Persian Letters, published in
1721. This work consists of letters written by two fictional Persian travelers, who as outsiders
see European customs in unique ways and thereby allow Montesquieu a vantage point for
criticizing existing practices and beliefs.
Disturbed by the growth in absolutism under Louis XIV and inspired by the example of the
physical sciences, Montesquieu set out to apply the critical method to the problem of
government in The Spirit of Laws (1748). Arguing that forms of government were shaped by
history and geography, Montesquieu identified three main types: monarchies, republics, and
despotisms. A great admirer of the English parliamentary system, he argued for a separation of
powers, with political power divided among different classes and legal estates holding unequal
rights and privileges. Montesquieu was no democrat; he was apprehensive about the
uneducated poor and did not question the sovereignty of the French monarchy. But he was
concerned that absolutism in France was drifting into tyranny and believed that strengthening
the influence of intermediary powers was the best way to prevent it. Decades later, his theory of
separation of powers had a great impact on the constitutions of the young United States in 1789
and of France in 1791.
The most famous philosophe was François Marie Arouet, known by the pen name Voltaire
(vohl-TAIR) (1694–1778). In his long career, Voltaire wrote more than seventy witty volumes,
hobnobbed with royalty, and died a millionaire through shrewd speculations. His early career,
however, was turbulent, and he was twice arrested for insulting noblemen. To avoid a prison
term, Voltaire moved to England for three years, and there he came to share Montesquieu’s
enthusiasm for English liberties and institutions.
Philosophes’ Dinner Party
This engraving depicts one of the famous dinners hosted by Voltaire at Ferney, the estate on the
French-Swiss border where he spent the last twenty years of his life. A visit to the great
philosophe (pictured in the center with arm raised) became a cherished pilgrimage for
Enlightenment writers.
Returning to France, Voltaire met Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du
Châtelet (SHAH-tuh-lay) (1706–1749), a gifted noblewoman. Madame du Châtelet invited
Voltaire to live in her country house at Cirey in Lorraine and became his long-time companion,
under the eyes of her tolerant husband. Passionate about science, she studied physics and
mathematics and published scientific articles and translations, including the first translation of
Newton’s Principia into French, still in use today. Excluded from the Royal Academy of Sciences
because she was a woman, Madame du Châtelet had no doubt that women’s limited role in
science was due to their unequal education. Discussing what she would do if she were a ruler,
she wrote, “I would reform an abuse which cuts off, so to speak, half the human race. I would
make women participate in all the rights of humankind, and above all in those of the intellect.”4
While living at Cirey, Voltaire wrote works praising England and popularizing English science.
Yet, like almost all of the philosophes, Voltaire was a reformer, not a revolutionary, in politics. He
pessimistically concluded that the best one could hope for in the way of government was a good
monarch, since human beings “are very rarely worthy to govern themselves.” Nor did Voltaire
believe in social and economic equality. The only realizable equality, Voltaire thought, was that
“by which the citizen only depends on the laws which protect the freedom of the feeble against
the ambitions of the strong.”5
Voltaire’s philosophical and religious positions were much more radical. He believed in God, but
he rejected Catholicism in favor of deism, belief in a distant noninterventionist deity. Drawing on
mechanistic philosophy, he envisioned a universe in which God acted like a great clockmaker
who built an orderly system and then stepped aside to let it run. Above all, Voltaire and most of
the philosophes hated all forms of religious intolerance, which they believed led to fanaticism
and cruelty. (See “AP® Thinking Like a Historian: The Enlightenment Debate on Religious
Tolerance,” page 220.)
The strength of the philosophes lay in their dedication and organization. Their greatest
achievement was a group effort — the seventeen-volume Encyclopedia: The Rational Dictionary
of the Sciences, the Arts, and the Crafts, edited by Denis Diderot (DEE-duh-roh) (1713–1784)
and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (dah-luhm-BEHR) (1717–1783). Completed in 1766 despite
opposition from the French state and the Catholic Church, the Encyclopedia contained
seventy-two thousand articles by leading scientists, writers, skilled workers, and progressive
priests. Science and the industrial arts were exalted, religion and immortality questioned.
Intolerance, legal injustice, and out-of-date social institutions were openly criticized. The
Encyclopedia also included many articles describing non-European cultures and societies, and
it acknowledged Muslim scholars’ contribution to Western science. Summing up the new
worldview of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopedia was widely read, especially in less expensive
reprint editions, and it was extremely influential.
After about 1770 a number of thinkers and writers began to attack the philosophes’ faith in
reason and progress. The most famous of these was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778).
The son of a poor Swiss watchmaker, Rousseau made his way into the Parisian Enlightenment
through his brilliant intellect. Like other Enlightenment thinkers, he was passionately committed
to individual freedom. Unlike them, however, he attacked rationalism and civilization as
destroying, rather than liberating, the individual. Warm, spontaneous feeling, Rousseau
believed, had to complement and correct cold intellect. Moreover, he asserted, the basic
goodness of the individual and the unspoiled child had to be protected from the cruel
refinements of civilization. Rousseau’s ideals greatly influenced the early Romantic movement,
which rebelled against the culture of the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century.
Rousseau’s contribution to political theory in The Social Contract (1762) was based on two
fundamental concepts: the general will and popular sovereignty. According to Rousseau, the
general will is sacred and absolute, reflecting the common interests of all the people, who have
displaced the monarch as the holder of sovereign power (and thus exercise popular
sovereignty). The general will is not necessarily the will of the majority, however. At times the
general will may be the authentic, long-term needs of the people as correctly interpreted by a
farsighted minority. Little noticed before the French Revolution, Rousseau’s concept of the
general will appealed greatly to democrats and nationalists after 1789.
Enlightenment Movements Across Europe
The Enlightenment was a movement of international dimensions, with thinkers traversing
borders in a constant exchange of visits, letters, and printed materials. Voltaire alone wrote
almost eighteen thousand letters to correspondents in France and across Europe. The Republic
of Letters, as this international group of scholars and writers was called, was a truly
cosmopolitan set of networks stretching from western Europe to its colonies in the Americas, to
Russia and eastern Europe, and along the routes of trade and empire to Africa and Asia.
Within this broad international conversation, scholars have identified numerous regional and
national particularities. Outside of France, many strains of Enlightenment — Protestant,
Catholic, and Jewish — sought to reconcile reason with faith, rather than emphasizing the errors
of religious fanaticism and intolerance. Some scholars point to a distinctive “Catholic
Enlightenment” that aimed to renew and reform the church from within, looking to divine grace
rather than human will as the source of progress.
The Scottish Enlightenment, which was centered in Edinburgh, was marked by an emphasis on
common sense and scientific reasoning. After the Act of Union with England in 1707, Scotland
was freed from political crisis to experience a vigorous period of intellectual growth. Advances in
philosophy were also stimulated by the creation of the first public educational system in Europe.
A central figure in Edinburgh was David Hume (1711–1776), whose emphasis on civic morality
and religious skepticism had a powerful impact at home and abroad. Hume strove to apply
Newton’s experimental methods to what he called the “science of man.” Building on Locke’s
writings on learning, Hume argued that the human mind is really nothing but a bundle of
impressions that originate only in sensory experiences and our habits of mentally joining these
experiences together. Therefore, reason cannot tell us anything about questions that cannot be
verified by sensory experience (in the form of controlled experiments or mathematics), such as
the origin of the universe or the existence of God. Hume further argued, in opposition to
Descartes, that reason alone could not supply moral principles and that they derived instead
from emotions and desires, such as feelings of approval or shame. Hume’s rationalistic inquiry
thus ended up undermining the Enlightenment’s faith in the power of reason by emphasizing the
superiority of the senses and the passions over reason in driving human thought and behavior.
Hume’s emphasis on human experience, rather than abstract principle, had a formative
influence on another major figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith (1723–1790).
Smith argued that social interaction produced feelings of mutual sympathy that led people to
behave in ethical ways, despite inherent tendencies toward self-interest. By observing others
and witnessing their feelings, individuals imaginatively experienced such feelings and learned to
act in ways that would elicit positive sentiments and avoid negative ones. Smith believed that
the thriving commercial life of the eighteenth century was likely to produce civic virtue through
the values of competition, fair play, and individual autonomy. In An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith attacked the laws and regulations created by
mercantilist governments that, he argued, prevented commerce from reaching its full capacity
(see “Adam Smith and Economic Liberalism” in Chapter 7).
Inspired by philosophers of moral sentiments like Hume and Smith, as well as by physiological
studies of the role of the nervous system in human perception, the celebration of sensibility
became an important element of eighteenth-century culture. Sensibility referred to an acute
sensitivity of the nerves and brains to outside stimuli, which produced strong emotional and
physical reactions. Novels, plays, and other literary genres depicted moral and aesthetic
sensibility as a particular characteristic of women and the upper classes. The proper
relationship between reason and the emotions (or between Sense and Sensibility, as Jane
Austen put it in the title of her 1811 novel) became a key question.
After 1760 Enlightenment ideas were hotly debated in the German-speaking states, often in
dialogue with Christian theology. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), a professor in East Prussia, was
the greatest German philosopher of his day. Kant posed the question of the age when he
published a pamphlet in 1784 titled What Is Enlightenment? He answered, “Sapere Aude [dare
to know]! ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding’ is therefore the motto of
enlightenment.” He argued that if intellectuals were granted the freedom to exercise their reason
publicly in print, enlightenment would almost surely follow. Kant was no revolutionary; he also
insisted that in their private lives individuals must obey all laws, no matter how unreasonable,
and should be punished for “impertinent” criticism. Like other Enlightenment figures in central
and east-central Europe, Kant thus tried to reconcile absolute monarchical authority and
religious faith with a critical public sphere.
Along with other German intellectuals, such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Kant introduced a new
strain of philosophy that became known as German idealism. Inspired by the work of David
Hume, Kant argued that, since our senses provide access only to the appearance of things and
not to “things in themselves,” a gap exists between reality and perception. However, Kant did
not accept the religious skepticism and moral relativism that these ideas produced in Hume.
Instead, he came to believe that humans possessed a shared framework for understanding
sensory impressions that did correspond to empirical reality. For Kant, these realities included
the existence of God and universal moral law. Kant thus attempted to reconcile rationalism and
empiricism, on the one hand, with faith and ethics on the other. Fichte and other German
philosophers after Kant took his idealism even further, arguing that objects have no independent
existence outside of people’s consciousness of them. By placing severe constraints on the
capacity of human reason to generate knowledge, German idealism represented a sharp blow
to the optimistic rationalism of earlier Enlightenment thinkers.
Important developments in Enlightenment thought also took place in the Italian peninsula. After
achieving independence from Habsburg rule (1734), the kingdom of Naples entered a period of
intellectual flourishing as reformers struggled to lift the heavy weight of church and noble power.
In northern Italy a central figure was Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794), a nobleman educated at
Jesuit schools and the University of Pavia. His On Crimes and Punishments (1764) was a
passionate plea for reform of the penal system that decried the use of torture, arbitrary
imprisonment, and capital punishment, and advocated the prevention of crime over the reliance
on punishment. The text was quickly translated into French and English and made an impact
throughout Europe and its colonies.
