Enlightenment a late eighteenth-century international movement in thought, with important social and political ramifications. The Enlightenment is at once a style, an attitude, a temper – critical, secular, skeptical, empirical, and practical. It is also characterized by core beliefs in human rationality, in what it took to be ‘nature,’ and in the ‘natural feelings’ of mankind. Four of its most prominent exemplars are Hume, Thomas Jefferson, Kant, and Voltaire.
The Enlightenment belief in human rationality had several aspects. (1) Human beings are free to the extent that their actions are carried out for a reason. Actions prompted by traditional authority, whether religious or political, are therefore not free; liberation requires weakening if not also overthrow of this authority. (2) Human rationality is universal, requiring only education for its development. In virtue of their common rationality, all human beings have certain rights, among them the right to choose and shape their individual destinies. (3) A final aspect of the belief in human rationality was that the true forms of all things could be discovered, whether of the universe (Newton’s laws), of the mind (associationist psychology), of good government (the U.S. Constitution), of a happy life (which, like good government, was ‘balanced’), or of beautiful architecture (Palladio’s principles). The Enlightenment was preeminently a ‘formalist’ age, and prose, not poetry, was its primary means of expression.
The Enlightenment thought of itself as a return to the classical ideas of the Greeks and (more especially) the Romans. But in fact it provided one source of the revolutions that shook Europe and America at the end of the eighteenth century, and it laid the intellectual foundations for both the generally scientific worldview and the liberal democratic society, which, despite the many attacks made on them, continue to function as cultural ideals.
See also HUME, KANT, LIBERALISM , LOCKE, VOLTAIR. G.G.B.