The Enlightenment did not simply question religious dogma. It replaced one authority with another — and the replacement was not neutral.
Between roughly 1685 and 1815, European thought underwent a structural reorganisation. Philosophers including Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Kant, and Rousseau challenged the authority of the Church and Crown, and argued instead for individual reason, empirical inquiry, and the separation of state from religious institution. These were, in many respects, genuinely liberating moves — against superstition, against persecution, against the abuse of ecclesiastical power.
But the Enlightenment was also a construction. What replaced religious authority was not simply “reason” in the abstract — it was a particular, culturally specific form of reason: materialist, individualist, and increasingly aligned with the interests of emerging capitalist economies. As Bertrand Russell documented in A History of Western Philosophy (1945), Enlightenment thinkers dismantled theological frameworks but replaced them with secular worldviews that still carried philosophical assumptions — about the nature of the self, about progress, about what counted as knowledge.
What Was Written Out
The Enlightenment narrative required a “Dark Ages” to justify itself — a prior era of ignorance and superstition from which reason rescued civilisation. This framing systematically erased the medieval Islamic Golden Age (history), in which scholars in Baghdad, Cordoba, and Cairo had already synthesised theology and science, revelation and rational inquiry, centuries before Descartes sat by his stove.
This was not accidental. It was epistemic violence (intrinsic epistemology) in its foundational form: the construction of an origin story for modernity that excluded the non-European intellectual traditions on which parts of it had actually drawn.
The Secular Settlement
The Enlightenment’s most durable legacy was not any specific philosophical position but an institutional settlement: the separation of knowledge from divine grounding. Science, economics, law, and ethics were each progressively secularised — made answerable to human reason and empirical evidence alone, with no reference to transcendent moral frameworks.
This produced extraordinary technical and institutional achievements. It also produced the compound ignorance (compound ignorance) at the core of modern life: a civilisation of extraordinary capability and extraordinary moral disorientation, unable to answer the foundational questions — what is prosperity for? what obligations do we have to each other? — because those questions had been evacuated of the framework that once gave them answers.
The Enlightenment is not to be rejected wholesale. But it is to be understood as a historical event with a perspective, not as the arrival of neutral truth.