Enlightenment

In December 1784 the Berlin journal Berlinische Monatsschrift published a short essay that would become the most quoted definition of an entire century: “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?) by Immanuel Kant. The question had been raised in the journal itself by Johann Friedrich Zöllner, a clergyman and Prussian official, who had remarked in a footnote in December 1783 that no one had yet answered satisfactorily what “Aufklärung” is, a word then in wide circulation without a precise definition. That the age of the Enlightenment had to ask itself publicly what it was says a good deal about the movement. From the start it was a reflection on itself, on the limits and rights of reason, and on who may exercise them. ...

Why should we obey the State? What makes a law legitimate rather than a mere order imposed by force? In the history of Western philosophy, these questions found their first systematically modern formulation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with three thinkers who changed forever the vocabulary of politics: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The three give radically different answers, but share a method: contractualism — the idea that political legitimacy must be thought from a hypothetical pact among free individuals. ...

Denis Diderot Denis Diderot (1713–1784) is one of the most complex and prolific figures of the French Enlightenment. The son of a cutler from Langres, he studied in Paris, lived through decades of turbulent intellectual life, and was the principal architect of the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–1772), which he co-edited with Jean le Rond d’Alembert. The project brought together the greatest minds of the century — Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Turgot — with the aim of gathering, systematizing, and disseminating human knowledge in the service of reason and the critique of superstition. Hounded by royal censorship and the Church, the enterprise stands as the greatest monument of the encyclopedist spirit and the Enlightenment faith in the transformative power of knowledge. ...

Edmund Burke Edmund Burke was born in Dublin on 12 January 1729 and died in Beaconsfield, England, on 9 July 1797. Educated at Trinity College Dublin and trained in law in London, he became a writer and, from 1766, a Whig member of the House of Commons, where he sat for nearly three decades. His work is not a philosophical system but a body of essays, speeches, and pamphlets occasioned by concrete political questions: the relation of Crown and Parliament, the conflict with the American colonies, the East India Company’s rule in India, and the French Revolution. His contribution to political philosophy lies precisely in this interplay of principle and circumstance. ...

Mary Wollstonecraft Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate for women’s rights, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is considered one of the founding texts of modern philosophical feminism. A contemporary of the American and French revolutions, Wollstonecraft applied Enlightenment principles of reason and equality to relations between the sexes, challenging the division between public and private spheres that excluded women from full citizenship. Key Concepts Rational Equality (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792): Her central argument — women and men share the same rational nature. If reason is the foundation of dignity and rights, as the Enlightenment thinkers hold, then women have the same entitlement to political and educational rights as men. The exclusion of women from the rational sphere is inconsistent with the very principles of the Enlightenment. Critique of Women’s Education: The conventional education of women cultivated ornament, passivity, and seductiveness rather than reason and virtue. Wollstonecraft argues that this education does not educate — it corrupts. Women trained to please are reduced to a permanent infantilism, becoming incapable of exercising moral and civic responsibilities. Critique of Rousseau: Émile (1762) prescribes for Sophie — the ideal woman — an education radically different from Émile’s, oriented toward submission and pleasing men. Wollstonecraft sees in this an internal contradiction: Rousseau condemns political despotism while prescribing domestic despotism. A woman educated in dependence will be a bad wife, a bad mother, and a bad citizen. Virtue and Morality: Wollstonecraft upholds an ethics of Kantian orientation avant la lettre: virtue is the same for men and women — it involves the exercise of reason, moral autonomy, and the fulfilment of duties. Virtue is neither feminine nor masculine, but human. The “femininity” cultivated by contemporary education is incompatible with genuine virtue. Citizenship and Public Life: Women should not be confined to the home — they should participate in public life as citizens. Wollstonecraft calls for women’s access to education, to the professions, and implicitly to the vote (a question she does not develop systematically, but which her premises imply). A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790): The first published response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, written before the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft defends the principles of the French Revolution and attacks Burke’s conservatism. ...

Montesquieu Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was born in 1689 near Bordeaux, into a family of the nobility of the robe. A magistrate and president of the Parlement of Bordeaux, he won literary fame with the Persian Letters (1721), an anonymous and witty satire that criticizes French customs and institutions through the eyes of fictional Persian travelers. After traveling through Europe — admiring above all the English constitution — he devoted some twenty years to his masterpiece, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), in which he founded the modern comparative science of politics. ...

Voltaire François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), who would adopt the pen name Voltaire, was the most celebrated and combative figure of the French Enlightenment. Witty and provocative, he was imprisoned in the Bastille and went into exile in England (1726–1728), where he admired political liberty, the empiricism of Locke, and the science of Newton — an experience he would recount in the Philosophical Letters. He frequented the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia and finally settled at Ferney, near the Swiss border, from where he directed public campaigns against injustice. A prolific writer, he left plays, poems, historical works, philosophical tales, and a vast Philosophical Dictionary. ...