The Enlightenment
▶ Explore on the mapThe Enlightenment was an intellectual movement of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that placed reason, evidence and natural law at the centre of thought about society and government. It grew in the coffee houses and salons of London, Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin and Glasgow, and it drew on the scientific revolution of the previous century, especially the example of Newton's laws. John Locke argued that government rests on the consent of the governed and that minds begin as blank slates; Montesquieu proposed the separation of powers; Voltaire attacked religious intolerance and arbitrary authority in witty pamphlets; and Jean Jacques Rousseau claimed that legitimate political authority lies in a general will. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopedie gathered crafts, sciences and criticism into a single work meant to spread useful knowledge. In Scotland and France, economists such as Adam Smith and the physiocrats examined wealth and trade without moralising about it. Rulers of the age, the enlightened despots Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great and Joseph II, used such ideas to justify reform from above. The American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 put its language of natural rights into political practice, and its confidence in reason still shapes public argument.