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enlightenment political thought  

Definition

  • The Enlightenment was a broad movement of reform that swept through Europe and the United States from (roughly) 1690 until the start of the French Revolution (1789–1799) a century later. The intellectual leadership of the Enlightenment came from prominent men of letters (as they called themselves) such as French philosophers Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and Jean le Rond d'Alembert; Swiss writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau; Scottish philosophers Adam Smith and David Hume; German philosophers Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; U.S. politician and philosopher Thomas Jefferson; and Italian politician and philosopher Beccaria (Cesare, Marquis de Beccaria-Bonsan); to name just a few. [Source: The Encyclopedia of Political Science; Enlightenment Political Thought]

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https://concepts.sagepub.com/social-science/concept/enlightenment_political_thought

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