The Enlightenment is a name given by historians to an intellectual movement that was
predominant in the Western world during the 18th century. Strongly influenced by the
rise of modern science and by the aftermath of the long religious conflict that followed
the Reformation, the thinkers of the Enlightenment (called philosophes in France) were
committed to secular views based on reason or human understanding only, which they hoped
would provide a basis for beneficial changes affecting every area of life and thought.
The more extreme and radical philosophes--Denis Diderot, Claude Adrien Helvetius, Baron
d'Holbach, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Julien Offroy de La Mettrie (1709-51)--advocated
a philosophical rationalism deriving its methods from science and natural philosophy that
would replace religion as the means of knowing nature and destiny of humanity; these men
were materialists, pantheists, or atheists. Other enlightened thinkers, such as Pierre
Bayle, Voltaire, David Hume, Jean Le Rond D'alembert, and Immanuel Kant, opposed
fanaticism, but were either agnostic or left room for some kind of religious faith.
Paul Heinrich Dietrich Baron d'Holbach
Title page of volume one of the Encyclopédie
Portrait of Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794)All of the philosophes saw themselves as continuing the work of the great 17th century
pioneers--Francis Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Leibnitz, Isaac Newton, and John Locke--who
had developed fruitful methods of rational and empirical inquiry and had demonstrated the
possibility of a world remade by the application of knowledge for human benefit. The
philosophes believed that science could reveal nature as it truly is and show how it could
be controlled and manipulated. This belief provided an incentive to extend scientific
methods into every field of inquiry, thus laying the groundwork for the development of the
modern social sciences.
The enlightened understanding of human nature was one that emphasized the right to self-
expression and human fulfillment, the right to think freely and express one's views publicly
without censorship or fear...