THE RECORD
What changed
Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant disagreed, while salons, newspapers, encyclopedias and coffeehouses widened debate.
EVIDENCE
What remains
Print, letters, censorship files and reading traces reveal how ideas were produced and circulated.
WHY IT MATTERS
Why it matters
It supplied vocabularies of legal equality, tolerance, divided power and public reason.
OPEN QUESTION
Where interpretation begins
Treating it as one European movement can hide exclusions of women and colonized peoples and non-European influences.