Enlightenment (Aufklärung) A broad intellectual movement in Europe characterized by a foregrounding of the power of reason and a setting aside of superstition. There is no consensus as to when exactly the Enlightenment began, but it is not generally thought to have started much before the publication in 1637 of René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la vérité dans les sciences (Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences), in which the famous slogan celebrating the centrality of reason ‘Je pense, donc je suis’ (I think, therefore I am) appears. Other highpoints include: The Encylopédistes, the group of authors led by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert who wrote the massive Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts), between 1751 and 1772, with the express purpose of changing the way people think by foregrounding scientifically acquired knowledge and banishing superstition; the Scottish Enlightenment, contemporaneous with the Encylopédistes, whose leading figures were David Hume, Adam Smith, and Robert Burns; in the US the group of statesmen who wrote the bill of rights were also considered part of the Enlightenment movement. In critical theory, however, Enlightenment is usually dated by the publication in 1784 of Kant, Immanuel’s essay ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’ (Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?), which famously defines Enlightenment as the coming to an end of humanity’s period of intellectual immaturity. See also Dialectic of Enlightenment. Further Reading: M. Foucault ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader (1984). J. Israel Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670—1752 (2008). R. Porter The Enlightenment (2001).