Historical Context and Origins of Enlightenment Thought

The Enlightenment unfolded roughly between the late seventeenth century and the late eighteenth century, with its principal centers in France, Great Britain, and Germany. The movement built directly on the methodological and conceptual advances of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, and the historian Paul Hazard famously described a "crisis of the European conscience" to capture the transition from Baroque sensibility to Enlightenment rationalism. The very term used for the period — Enlightenment in English, Aufklärung in German, Lumières in French — is a metaphor for the light of reason dispelling the darkness of inherited tradition and superstition.