Enlightenment

Reason, rights and revolution. The eighteenth century believed that the method which had explained the planets could explain everything else, and set out to try. Montesquieu applied it to law and found that constitutions depended on climate and custom. Hume applied it to the mind and found that reason could not justify its own most basic habits. Adam Smith applied it to wealth and found an order no one had designed. Rousseau applied it to society and found that society had ruined us, then wrote the Social Contract to say how it could be redeemed.

Kant is the century’s summit. He read Hume, saw the abyss, and wrote the three Critiques to close it; the Groundwork, which is short and on eight lists, is the moral philosophy in outline. The Americans, meanwhile, took Locke and Montesquieu and wrote them into a Declaration, a Constitution and the Federalist, all of which are here, and the French took Rousseau and wrote a Declaration of the Rights of Man that Burke answered with the Reflections.

The literature is satire and the rise of the novel: Swift, Voltaire’s Candide, Pope, Fielding, Sterne, and Johnson, who defined the language. Most programs assign this era in the third year, and it pairs with the seventeenth century as the two halves of the argument that produced the modern state.