Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — centred in France, Britain, Scotland, and the German states — that placed reason, empirical inquiry, and individual autonomy at the centre of human life and political organisation. Its foundational claim was that the authority of tradition, revelation, and hierarchy could and should be supplanted by the authority of rational argument and evidence.

The movement's monuments — the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert, Kant's critical philosophy, Locke's political theory, Smith's economics, Hume's skepticism — were themselves among the most ambitious exercises in cultural transmission in Western history: systematic efforts to codify and propagate an entire worldview. That this worldview included its own critique (Hume's skepticism undermined the rationalism it stood beside) is the Enlightenment's most honest feature.

The Enlightenment did not end. It was absorbed, contested, and partially reversed — by Romanticism, by the catastrophes of the twentieth century that rationalist optimism failed to prevent, and by postmodernism's challenge to the universalism that underwrote the project. What remains is not a settled inheritance but a permanent cultural argument about whether reason is the right tool for the problems that matter most.

The historian Peter Gay called it 'the rise of modern paganism.' Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called it the seedbed of totalitarianism. Both were right about different things, which is approximately what the Enlightenment itself would have predicted.