Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that placed reason, evidence and individual liberty above tradition and religious authority. Its roots lie in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and in thinkers such as Isaac Newton, John Locke and Rene Descartes, and it reached its height in the eighteenth century in Europe and America. Philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Immanuel Kant discussed freedom of thought, the separation of powers and the social contract, while Denis Diderot edited the great Encyclopedie. Ideas spread through salons, journals and coffee houses. Enlightenment thought influenced the American and French Revolutions, and it left a legacy of human rights, religious tolerance and modern science, though its limits and inconsistencies on slavery and colonialism have also been criticised.

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