What Was the Enlightenment? The Enlightenment has been defined in many different ways, but at its broadest was a philosophical, intellectual and cultural movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It stressed reason, logic, criticism and freedom of thought over dogma, blind faith and superstition. Logic wasnt a new invention, having been used by the ancient Greeks, but it was now included in a worldview which argued that empirical observation and the examination of human life could reveal the truth behind human society and self, as well as the universe. All were deemed to be rational and understandable. The Enlightenment held that there could be a science of man, and that the history of mankind was one of progress, which could be continued with the right thinking.

Consequently, the Enlightenment also argued that human life and character could be improved through the use of education and reason. The mechanistic universe that is to say, the universe when considered to be a functioning machine could also be altered. The Enlightenment thus brought interested thinkers into direct conflict with the political and religious establishment; these thinkers have even been described as intellectual terrorists against the norm. They challenged religion with the scientific method, often instead favouring deism. The Enlightenment thinkers wanted to do more than understand, they wanted to change for, as they believed, the better: they thought reason and science would improve lives.

The end is usually given as either the death of Voltaire, one of the key Enlightenment figures, or the start of the French Revolution. This is often claimed to have marked the downfall of the Enlightenment, as attempts to rework Europe into a more logical and egalitarian system collapsed into bloodshed which killed leading writers.

This might have led to some historians wishing to drop the label Enlightenment were it not for the fact that the Enlightenment thinkers actually called their era one of Enlightenment. The thinkers believed that they were intellectually better off than many of their peers, who were still in a superstitious darkness, and they wished to literally lighten them and their views. Kants key essay of the era, Was ist Aufklrung literally means What is Enlightenment?, and was one of a number of responses to a journal which had been trying to pin down a definition. Variations in thought are still seen as part of the general movement.

Where historians once believed that the philosophes were the sole carriers of Enlightenment thought, they now generally accept that they were merely the vocal tip of a much more widespread intellectual awakening among the middle and upper classes, turning them into a new social force. These were professionals such as lawyers and administrators, office holders, higher clergy and landed aristocracy, and it was these who read the many volumes of Enlightenment writing, including the Encyclopdie and soaked up their thinking.

Link:
The Enlightenment - European History