Enlightenment

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...