Before the Light
Diderot edited this many-volume collection of articles on science, government, and philosophy that kings and the Church feared and France banned.
Encyclopédie
DOUBLE JEOPARDY
Named for a giant sea monster in the Bible, this 1651 book argued that people must hand their power to a sovereign.
Leviathan
According to Locke, every person is born with these three natural rights.
“Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
This 1807 act of Parliament ended the British slave trade but did not free a single person already enslaved.
Slave Trade Act
London’s coffeehouses earned this nickname because one coin bought a cup of coffee and a seat in the conversation.
Penny Universities
This thinker trained as a doctor, fled to the Netherlands in 1683, and came home after the Glorious Revolution to publish his Two Treatises.
John Locke
DOUBLE JEOPARDY
Hobbes’s name for a world with no government, laws, or police, where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
State of Nature
“To prevent this abuse, it is necessary […] that power should be a check to power.”
Baron de Montesquieu
Wollstonecraft dedicated A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to this French leader, whose school plan taught girls mainly at home.
Talleyrand
This French royal order let the king jail someone without a trial; it put Voltaire in the Bastille in 1717.
Lettre de Cachet
He sold his job as a judge to travel and study governments, and admired how England shared power among the king, Parliament, and the courts.
Baron de Montesquieu
Montesquieu’s idea that each branch of government can limit the other two so none grows too strong.
Checks & Balances
“Woman, wake up; the alarm bell of reason is sounding throughout the universe; recognize your rights.”
Olympe de Gouges
Catherine the Great borrowed from Montesquieu and called torture “contrary to Reason,” yet she expanded serfdom and kept absolute power. Historians use this term for rulers like her.
Enlightened Despots
DOUBLE JEOPARDY
Thinkers met at this Paris café, one of the places where new ideas were shared and argued over.
Café Procope
He proudly signed his books “Citizen of Geneva,” yet Geneva burned his most famous book in 1762.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau’s term for what the whole community wants for the common good, which he said laws should follow.
General Will
DOBULE JEOPARDY
“O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God…?”
Olaudah Equiano
Wollstonecraft and de Gouges both argued that rights come from this human ability. Since women share it, they said, women deserve the same rights as men.
Reason
Alongside Louis XIV of France, this ruler of Russia (1682–1725) is a famous example of an absolute monarch who built a large army and ruled without sharing power.
Peter the Great
After a quarrel with a powerful noble in 1726, this writer was forced into exile in England, where he came to admire its freer press.
Voltaire
Rousseau’s idea that the highest power to rule belongs to the people as a whole, not to a king.
Popular Sovereignty
“The sovereign […] is himself nothing more than the first servant of the state.”
Frederick the Great
DOUBLE JEOPARDY
The abolitionist medallion asked, “Am I not a man and a brother?” It was arguing that enslaved Africans were born with these, just as Locke said every person is.