ABSTRACT
Enlightenment as an intellectual movement eventually covered the whole of Europe and America, but it really began in the more liberal political climate in France after the death of Louis XIV. His successors quickly lost his reputation for grandeur and piety. The political and social message of the materialist philosophy which Enlightenment took and developed from the seventeenth-century science of Descartes and Newton was deeply coded, but, for those with eyes to see it, it had a profoundly radical message. The consensus of Enlightenment opinion seems to have been that reason could in some sense control and direct the passions towards ends which were ethically desirable. Enlightenment attempted to expand the principles of toleration and moderation into general principles of individual life and the life of society and politics, and it is no exaggeration to say that all that is best in the Western liberal tradition comes from Enlightenment.
