The Early Modern Age · School
The Enlightenment
The eighteenth-century movement that turned reason against religion, politics and custom; Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau and Kant led it.
Representative figures · 10
John Locke洛克
Founder of empiricism and father of liberalism: the mind is a blank slate, and government rests on the consent of the governed.
Montesquieu孟德斯鸠
The Spirit of the Laws proposed the separation of powers and tied political institutions to climate, custom and history, founding comparative politics.
Voltaire伏尔泰
The embodiment of the Enlightenment, who wielded wit against superstition, fanaticism and intolerance: 'crush the infamous thing'.
David Hume休谟
Took empiricism to its limit: causation is habit, the self a bundle of perceptions, reason the slave of the passions. Kant said he woke him from his dogmatic slumber.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau卢梭
'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains': civilisation corrupted us, the general will is the only legitimate sovereign, and the Enlightenment's rebel from within.
Denis Diderot狄德罗
Editor of the Encyclopédie, who spent twenty-five years gathering all knowledge into one work and explored every forbidden question in materialist essays and dialogue-novels.
Adam Smith亚当·斯密
A professor of moral philosophy who wrote The Wealth of Nations: sympathy shapes morality, an invisible hand coordinates markets, and economics became a science.
Immanuel Kant康德
The Copernican revolution of philosophy: objects conform to our forms of knowing, not knowledge to objects. Reason legislates for nature and for itself.
Condorcet孔多塞
The last of the Encyclopedists: mathematician, revolutionary, advocate of women's rights and abolition, who wrote the sketch of humanity's infinite progress while hiding from the guillotine.
Mary Wollstonecraft玛丽·沃斯通克拉夫特
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman argued that women are not naturally weak but educated to be; reason has no sex, and women's rights are the Enlightenment's necessary conclusion.