ABSTRACT
When one talks about ‘the Enlightenment’, ‘les Lumières, or ‘die Aufklärung’, one is thinking of a period of European cultural change which lies between the early seventeenth century and the first French Revolution, and doing so from the point of view of a series of radical thinkers—thinkers such as Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Beccaria, Hume and Lessing—for whom intellectual experiment was to be valued rather than resisted. The Tridentine form of Roman Catholic theology and the world-views which went with it had reached a natural limit of usefulness by the mid-seventeenth century, although the system as a whole was still heavily backed by state power; ecclesiastical Protestantism, despite its divisions, was no less dogmatic in intention and often socially repressive. The gradual revolt of a section of Europe's cultural elites against the hegemony of Christian world-views was not so much a sinful function of human pride, whose errors would be clearly revealed in the fate of the so-called ‘Enlightenment-project’, as a natural development as the late-medieval world-order, already weakened in the sixteenth century, fell apart.
