The Enlightenment (1750–89)

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement of the long eighteenth century in which writers, scientists and reformers argued that human reason, applied to evidence, could improve knowledge, government and daily life. This elective concentrates on 1750–89, but its roots lie earlier, and the syllabus names three connected causes.

Weakening authority of the Church and of absolute monarchy. The Reformation and the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries broke the idea of one Christian authority over Europe. The Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years War, recognised Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist worship in the Holy Roman Empire, so no single church could claim to speak for all of Western Christendom.

Absolute monarchs such as Louis XIV of France (r. 1643–1715) claimed to rule by divine right, yet expensive wars and heavy taxation exposed the costs of that model. England's Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 offered a contrast: a monarchy limited by Parliament and a Bill of Rights.

The Scientific Revolution. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and especially Isaac Newton, whose Principia (1687) explained planetary motion through universal mathematical laws, showed that nature could be understood through observation, experiment and calculation rather than ancient authority. Enlightenment writers asked whether the same method could be applied to society, politics and religion.

The spread of ideas. Rising literacy, cheaper printing, periodicals, coffeehouses, Masonic lodges, Parisian salons run by women such as Madame Geoffrin, and learned academies created a cross-border ‘republic of letters’. The Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert and published in volumes from 1751 to 1772, gathered practical and philosophical knowledge for subscribers across Europe. Ideas moved through letters, translations and smuggled books even where censorship operated.

Weighing the forces. Historians link the growth of a debating ‘public sphere’ to the rise of capitalism, which increased the need to exchange information (an economic force), and to the consolidation of the modern state (a political force); a growing middle class supplied readers and audiences (a social force); and rulers such as Frederick II of Prussia patronised philosophers at court (leadership).

Weighing these forces helps explain why the movement took different forms in different places: in France it became associated with anti-government and anti-Church radicalism, while in Germany it reached deep into the middle classes.