The philosophical, scientific, and rational attitudes, the freedom from superstition, and the belief in religious tolerance of much of 18th-century Europe. In Germany the Aufklärung (‘Enlightenment’), which extended from the middle of the 17th century to the beginning of the 19th century, was a literary and philosophical movement that included Gotthold Lessing (1729–81), J. W. von Goethe (1749–1823), and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), as well as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). The Yiddish literature of Eastern Europe experienced a new dynamism, while a similarly invigorating freedom of ideas affected writers as far apart as Sweden, Russia, and Britain. In France the Enlightenment was associated with the philosophes, the literary men, scientists, and thinkers who were united in their belief in the supremacy of reason and their desire to see practical change to combat inequality and injustice. The movement against established beliefs and institutions gained momentum throughout the 18th century under Voltaire (1694–1778), Rousseau, Condorcet, and others. Through the publication of the Encyclopédie (1751–76) their attacks on the government, the church, and the judiciary provided the intellectual basis for the French Revolution.

The English Enlightenment owed its origin both to the political theories of John Locke, and to the French example. Thomas Paine, an admirer of the French, advocated American independence, and many writers and poets transmitted Enlightenment ideas. In Scotland an intellectual movement flourished in Edinburgh between 1750 and 1800; its outstanding philosophers were Hume and Adam Smith and important scientific advances were made in chemistry, geology and medicine. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, began in 1768–71 as a dictionary of the arts and sciences, was issued by a ‘Society of gentlemen in Scotland’. In literature, some have seen a connection between the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the growth of literary realism, and the rise of the novel. It influenced the Romantic movement in the arts by releasing the more individualist attitudes in which this movement was based, and as the Romantics themselves reacted against the coldly scientific intellectualism which the Enlightenment represented.