Voices of the Enlightenment

1694–1778 · France

François-Marie Arouet, who took the name Voltaire, was the most famous writer in Europe for most of his eighty-three years — poet, playwright, historian, satirist, and the author of some twenty thousand letters. Imprisoned in the Bastille at twenty-three for verses mocking the regent and exiled to England at thirty-one, he returned with a conviction that outlived him: that cruelty thrives on unexamined authority, and that ridicule is a weapon against it. In old age he became something new — a private citizen who took up the cause of men destroyed by the courts, and won.

1759–1797 · England

English writer and philosopher whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is a founding text of feminist thought. She argued that women appear inferior only because they are denied education, and lived an independent, self-supporting intellectual life well ahead of her era.

1723–1790 · Scotland

Moral philosopher first, economist second: The Theory of Moral Sentiments explained sympathy; The Wealth of Nations explained markets, specialization, and why nations prosper. Both books are about the same thing — how self-interested humans cooperate.

1711–1776 · Scotland

The good-natured skeptic of the Scottish Enlightenment: he showed that custom, not reason, rules most of life, that causation is inference not observation — and remained the most cheerful dinner guest in Edinburgh while dismantling philosophy's certainties.

1724–1804 · Prussia

The Königsberg professor whose daily walk set the town's clocks and whose Critiques reset philosophy: knowledge shaped by the knowing mind, morality grounded in duty, every person an end and never merely a means.