The Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Reason) refers to a distinct period in the history of European thought that roughly correlates to the late 17th and 18th centuries. It incorporated a wealth of ideas that fundamentally reformed science, religion, politics and economics. The specific ideas of many of its leading figures are looked at in more detail elsewhere in this book – among them John Locke, David Hume and Edmund Burke, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, George Berkeley and Adam Smith, Isaac Newton and Immanuel Kant. Nonetheless, the Enlightenment as a whole is worthy of appraisal for the way in which it unified thinkers from disparate traditions in a commitment to principles such as reason, democracy and the rights of the individual.
The Enlightenment is so important because it marked the beginning of the modern age of thought – spreading first from Europe’s traditional centres of learning across the continent as a whole and then to the world at large. Intellectually, it signified a decisive move away from superstition, and saw science supersede religion as the primary source of accepted knowledge-acquisition. In the words of Locke: ‘To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.’ Politically, it signposted the way towards democracy and away from models of oppressive government and their attendant arbitrary application of the law. Immanuel Kant contended:
Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’ – that is the motto of enlightenment.
The early Enlightenment was bookmarked by the appearance of such revolutionary works as Newton’s Principia and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, but it soon took on differing characteristics in different places. There were, for example, distinct ‘Enlightenments’ associated with England, France, Germany, Scotland, Switzerland and America.
The Enlightenment’s bible
In France in the third quarter of the 18th century, Denis Diderot was instrumental in publishing the Encyclopédie, which may be regarded as the Enlightenment’s bible. It brought together writings from many of the age’s foremost minds in a bid to create a comprehensive compendium of all human knowledge. It was also key to fomenting the conditions in which the seeds of the French Revolution could bloom – an event Pankaj Mishra has said ‘actualised the Enlightenment’s greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.’ Although the Age of Reason was drawing to a close, many of the foundations had been laid for the political, scientific and philosophical movements that have shaped the centuries since.