Enlightenment, The

Definitions

The most famous definition of Enlightenment is that of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804):

In the West, this vision was put into place through a variety of economic, political, and societal approaches such as the scientific and technological revolutions; the development of entrepreneurial capitalism and person-centered humanism; the emancipation of women; as well as through the corresponding public discourses of rationalism and liberalism. Philosophers, scientists, and politicians like Denis Diderot, Voltaire, Adam Newton, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Thomas Paine propagated public education, independent and critical mass media, and democracy to increase social participation and justice by providing equal chances, making society thus more open and productive. Artists like Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe insisted on religious and cultural tolerance. The Enlightenment also laid the foundations for the separation of state and religion, and thus for the institution of the modern laicistic state. The respective ideas found expression in the American Constitution of 1776 and in the French Revolution of 1789, which proposed liberty, equality, and brotherhood as ideals to pursue by the means of the rule of law and cultural and social pluralism. In 1948, these principles inspired the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the General Assembly of the United Nations and, since then, most of the differing attempts to theorize and implement forms of international and global government.

As the interweaving ideology underlying all these aspects, which together constituted (and still drive) modernity as we know it, the Enlightenment stays until today at the center of the modern Western mind-set and of the knowledge societies produced by it. Insofar as it gave origin to most of the characteristics that defined modernity throughout the past two centuries, the Enlightenment remains the embodiment of four core features, which are still at the center of contemporary postindustrial societies: (1) technological modernization, (2) secularization, (3) pluralization, and (4) multiculturalization. They are kept together by the practice of public rational critique as demystification, that is, by Enlightenment as an ethics and politics of public discourse specific to democratic communities (Jürgen Habermas).

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