Chapter Summary
Following the significant achievements of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, the great European cultural movement known as the Enlightenment appears decidedly modern. The preoccupation with the moral and intellectual improvement of all humanity; the use of criticism as a scalpel to cut away the fanaticism, superstition, and bigotry of the ancien régime; the use of reason in all human affairs; the perfectibility of humankindall this speaks volumes about the philosophes of the eighteenth century in particular, and about enlightenment in general. Historians did not invent the expression Enlightenment to specify an age, or even a state of mind. Instead, it was the philosophes of the eighteenth century itselffrom Italy, France, Germany, the United States, and England (indeed, all of Europe as well as across the Atlantic)who used words like illuminati, Aufklärung, lumière, and enlightenment to describe the age they believed they had bequeathed to humanity.
Perhaps because of the stature of Voltaire alone, the Enlightenment has often been considered a French phenomenon. And indeed, French contributions to enlightened thought were immense. But the Enlightenment was a trans-Atlantic phenomenon: for every philosophe one might find in Paris, we could easily locate others in London, Berlin, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Leipzig, or Boston. Peter Gay describes the philosophes as a "party of humanity," and while they often quarreled among themselves, they cooperated in times of crisis.
The great task this "party of humanity" assigned itself was nothing less than the application of reason to all human affairs. Submit everything to reason and criticism, they said. Whatever did not stand the test ought to be eradicated or, as Voltaire put it, one must "Écrasez l'infâme" ("wipe out the infamous")! Using the "Holy Trinity" of Bacon, Locke, and Newton, the philosophes had all the power of science at their disposalif Newton and others could unlock the mysteries of nature with Human Reason, then that same Human Reason could be used to unlock the mysteries of man and society. It is no accident that most of our modern social sciences, were born in the eighteenth century.
The zeal with which the philosophes attacked the institutions of the ancien régime certainly constituted a new faith, and that faitha faith in human reasonwould help them build what they called the New Jerusalem here on earth. As Cesar Chesneau Dumarsis wrote in his article "Philosophe," for the Encyclopedia, "Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian."