CultureEurope
The Enlightenment
Reason placed above authority — in principle
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The Encyclopédie, published in twenty-eight volumes from 1751, gathered all knowledge in one work with the declared aim of changing how people think. The contradiction is glaring and important: the same decades that formulated human rights were the most intense of the Atlantic slave trade, and several of the thinkers wrote disparagingly of other peoples.
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Thinkers such as Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant argued that people have rights simply by being human, that power must be justified, and that knowledge should be tested rather than believed. The ideas underlie almost every modern constitution.
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Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org