The eighteenth-century argument about reason and authority.
8 topics · 7 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Letters Concerning the English Nation
Voltaire · 1733
Uses admiring reports on English religious toleration, Newton and constitutional government to needle French absolutism by comparison — itself an act…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Anti-Machiavel
Frederick II of Prussia · 1740
Written before he became king, Frederick's chapter-by-chapter refutation of Machiavelli argues a ruler's legitimacy rests on serving his subjects'…
+1 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary
David Hume · 1741
Essays on taste, politics and society arguing that custom and sentiment, not abstract reason, are the actual basis of moral and political judgement —…
+2 more at this level
7 works
Voltaire
Uses admiring reports on English religious toleration, Newton and constitutional government to needle French absolutism by comparison — itself an act of the cross-Channel exchange it describes.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Argues, against the Enlightenment's own faith in progress, that the advance of the arts and sciences has corrupted rather than improved human morals.
about 8 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Frederick II of Prussia
Written before he became king, Frederick's chapter-by-chapter refutation of Machiavelli argues a ruler's legitimacy rests on serving his subjects' welfare — the doctrine he then governed by as an 'enlightened' autocrat.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Immanuel Kant
Defines Enlightenment as humanity's emergence from self-imposed immaturity, and argues that a public free to reason and criticise — even under an obedient private citizenry — is what makes that emergence possible.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David Hume
Essays on taste, politics and society arguing that custom and sentiment, not abstract reason, are the actual basis of moral and political judgement — a central document of the Scottish Enlightenment's empiricist turn.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jürgen Habermas
Argues a genuine public sphere of critical debate briefly flourished in eighteenth-century coffeehouses, salons and print, before commercial mass media hollowed it back out into passive consumption.
Robert Darnton
Uses the publisher's own commercial records to argue the Encyclopédie's later editions spread Enlightenment ideas to a much wider provincial bourgeois readership because they were cheaper, not more radical.
link checked 17 Sept 2026