The Enlightenment was a debate about ideas. Enlightenment-era philosophers asked whether people could use logic to understand and improve the world; whether we are all born with natural rights like life and liberty; and whether governments get their authority from the people and thus have a responsibility to protect us. But ideas alone do not make a difference in people’s lives. Enlightenment thinkers could only truly be significant if they changed the laws and systems of government of the societies in which they lived. In this article, we’ll look at some of the ways in which these high-minded principles became reality, and some of the limitations to real change following the Enlightenment.

Can ideas lead to real change? Modern examples

People have lots of ideas about how to shape their societies—some good, some bad. Only some of those ideas lead to actual changes, however, and that process usually happens slowly. People need to see that new ideas are relevant to them, and then they need to advocate for new laws or changes to turn ideas into reality.

This process of ideas transforming reality has happened in the recent past. Two good examples are disability rights and neurodiversity awareness. Have you ever used captions on a video? Or walked through an automatic door? Or noticed curb cuts on a sidewalk? You can thank the disability rights movement for these changes to our daily lives. Disability rights started with a simple idea: People with disabilities deserve equal access to public life. But this idea wasn’t generally embraced by most people before the 1960s. In fact, it took the work of a bunch of thinkers—including disability rights scholars like Ed Roberts and Judith Heumann—to explain that disability rights could help everyone. It also took activists—such as those who occupied the San Francisco Federal Building in the United States in the 1970s—to make closed captions and curb cuts and many, many other innovations a reality.

Similarly, before the 1990s, it was believed that most people had “normal” brains, and anyone who exhibited unusual behavior was diseased. It took advocates like Judy Singer to recognize that humans had diverse ways of thinking, and that society prospered when we accommodated this neurodiversity. Now, we have classrooms that offer different learning options for students with ADHD and autism, and we understand the strengths as well as challenges of thinking differently.

How Enlightenment ideas led to women’s rights

Just as ideas like disability rights and neurodiversity awareness are changing our society today, Enlightenment ideas transformed societies by inspiring reform movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of the most important of these changes has been the movement advocating for women’s rights.

As early as 1792, philosophers—many of them female—were applying the new concepts of the Enlightenment to women. If the Enlightenment saw all men as rational, then surely women were rational as well. If the Enlightenment claimed political rights for all men, then surely women deserved those rights also. At the height of the French Revolution, in 1791, Olympe de Gouges wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen. Responding to male philosophers who had claimed rights for all men, she demanded that women be recognized as citizens also, with full rights to property, education, and political participation.

Women in the United States also picked up these ideas. In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized a meeting of women in Seneca Falls, New York, that was attended by over 300 delegates. While supported by men, including Frederick Douglass, women were the main participants in the conference. By the Seneca Falls Convention’s end, the delegates had issued a proclamation, the Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded women’s suffrage—the right to vote—as well as equal access to jobs and education. They also called for changes to marriage laws that would protect women and give them full rights.

Of course, these campaigners for women’s rights didn’t see all their goals achieved. In most countries, women didn’t get the right to vote until the twentieth century. In many places, women still earn less than men, and face additional inequalities and restrictions. But these early reformers laid the foundation for making Enlightenment ideas reality for many women.

Enlightenment contributions to the abolition of slavery

It is significant that Frederick Douglass supported the Seneca Falls Conference. At the same time he was at the conference, he was also busily working to get Enlightenment ideas applied to a different community—enslaved people of African descent.

The Enlightenment emerged largely out of European societies that also practiced slavery. In fact, many supporters of Enlightenment ideas were also slave owners. Many of those who proclaimed the equality of all men participated in a system that made some people into property. It didn’t take long for reformers to point out that Enlightenment ideas of universal freedom and liberty obviously clashed with the system of enslavement and oppression.

The Enlightenment helped spark a movement, at first in Britain, for the abolition of slavery. Thinkers like Thomas Clarkson argued that slavery violated reason and natural law. These abolitionists lobbied first to end Britain’s participation in the slave trade, and then to end slavery itself—in Britain, and then elsewhere. But perhaps the most effective abolitionists were enslaved people themselves. Some worked individually, like West African-born Olaudah Equiano, who wrote of his personal suffering in a way that invoked both Christian and Enlightenment refutations of slavery.

Enslaved people also found that resisting together gave them great power. In every slaver society, enslaved people resisted and rose up in rebellion. Leaders of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), for example, were inspired by the Enlightenment ideas that sparked revolution in France. Living in a French colony, leaders of African descent like Toussaint Louverture wondered how France could proclaim liberty for its citizens while profiting from slavery. In leading Haiti’s enslaved population to freedom, he mixed the Enlightenment claim to natural freedom for all with African political traditions.

The abolition of slavery was not a gift from the powerful. Rather, it was the result of a global struggle for human dignity, fueled by Enlightenment principles but also carried out by people of African descent as agents of their own liberation. It also had its limits. While the legal status of enslaving people came to an end in many parts of the world, many individuals continued to be kept in some sort of bondage, even where it was illegal.

The Enlightenment and the reform of serfdom

Enlightenment ideas also helped to change serfdom, a system in which peasants were legally tied to the land and subject to the control of landowners and nobles. Variations of this system existed in the seventeenth century in many parts of Europe, including the Russian and Habsburg Empires, as well as the Ottoman Sultanate and other parts of the world. Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire in France and Adam Smith in Great Britain criticized this system as unjust and argued that free labor was more effective than serfdom.

The gradual reform, and in some places, abolition of serfdom was partly organized by rulers who were influenced by these Enlightenment thinkers. For example, Emperor Joseph II of the Habsburg Empire partially freed serfs in the 1780s, citing the ideas of Voltaire and others. Nearly a century later, in 1861, Tsar Alexander II officially ended serfdom in the Russian Empire as well, calling it an “evil” system. He was partly inspired by Enlightenment ideas, but also the evidence that Russia’s serf-driven economy was falling behind parts of Europe where farmers were free. In the Ottoman Empire, a series of nineteenth-century reforms known as the Tanzimat were ordered by sultans, leading to new protections for peasants, including full equality before the law and clear rules over land ownership.

As with other reforms we’ve discussed in this article, it’s important to note that these changes were partly driven by the affected people themselves. Both Joseph II and Alexander II were driven to reform the lives of rural agricultural workers partly in response to revolts by the peasants themselves. Tsar Alexander, for example, was reportedly shaken by rural revolts. He said, “It is better to begin abolishing serfdom from above than to wait for it to begin to abolish itself from below.” Enlightenment ideas played a role, but so did political unrest!

And like other reforms, the abolition of serfdom was slow and often incomplete. In Russia, serfs became legally free but had to pay high fees to their former landlords. Often, they got no land, or poor land, and had to continue to work the same land under only slightly better conditions than they had experienced as serfs. In the Ottoman Empire, reforms sometimes had the opposite effect of what they were intended to do—reinforcing the power of landlords instead of weakening it.

Conclusions

Enlightenment ideas alone did not transform the world. Real reform of oppressive systems depended on people taking action. Often, these people were motivated reformers. Usually, the movements were led by the people suffering oppression themselves. Reform movements took a long time, and in some cases, they remain incomplete.

We can say something similar about ideas about neurodivergence and disability rights today. These ideas are affecting our societies because of the campaigning of reformers intent on changing the world in ways that they believe are better. These reformers are in the midst of a long struggle. What lessons might they draw from the campaigners for the abolition of slavery and serfdom and equal rights for women? How might we learn from these campaigns to change ideas into reality ourselves?