ABSTRACT
A king is the slave of history. (Leo Tolstoy)
Dare to know. (Immanuel Kant)
The Enlightenment is the name given to the intellectual and cultural movement that swept across Europe during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was a time of intellectual curiosity and scientific advancement. The term is often used carelessly, the suggestion being that before the Enlightenment came along European society was somehow ‘endarkened’, which it emphatically was not; the roots of Enlightenment thinking are to be found in the Middle Ages. Nor did intellectual curiosity cease during or after the French Revolution, the traditional endpoint for the Enlightenment period used by most historians; the scientific revolution of the nineteenth century was the Enlightenment’s direct inheritor. The chapter title has been phrased so as to indicate that we are covering a broader period: an age characterized by critical thinking, not just the Enlightenment per se.
