Newton’s work seemed to prove that order and mathematically demonstrable laws were at work in the physical universe. Perhaps a similar order and rationality could be imposed on the social and political institutions. This ideal fired the imagination of the leaders of the Enlightenment, who gradually became known as philosophes, simply French for “philosophers.” But regardless of national origin, the name took hold for thinkers as diverse as the French writer Voltaire, the American scientist and

n, and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).

By the 1770’s, Paris had become the center of the Enlightenment, but circles of philosophes could be found in Berlin, Moscow, Budapest, London, The Hague, and, across the Atlantic, in Philadelphia. Their writings spread far and wide because they adopted a new style for philosophical discussion: clear, direct, witty, satirical, even naughty and audacious. At times, they were more like journalists, propagandists, writers of fiction, even pornographers. Now and then, they wrote anonymously, but always they sought to live by their pens. Their success owed much to the growing literacy of urban men and women, a new prosperity that made books affordable, and, not least, the existence of an audience that liked what they had to say. The philosophes’ readers, too, were fed up with all vestiges of medieval culture. They resented priestly privileges, protected social classes, monarchical decrees in place of deliberation in representative assemblies, and restrictions on who could manufacture what and where. They had wearied of iniquitous taxes designed by bureaucrats who never had to pay them, and indeed of everything that could not be explained rationally.

The French philosophes were the most outspoken and mo

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