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Whose 1784 essay 'What Is Enlightenment?' provided the movement's most famous summary, *Sapere aude* ('Dare to know')?
Kant's 1784 essay *Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?* offered the standard summary of the movement's self-conception: the application of independent reasoning to all questions, captured by the slogan *Sapere aude* — 'Dare to know.' Voltaire died in 1778; Rousseau in 1778; Hume in 1776 — none of them wrote this essay.
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The Enlightenment The Enlightenment was an 18th-century European intellectual movement that emphasized reason, individual liberty, scientific inquiry, religious tolerance, and constitutional government. It produced the political philosophy behind the American and French Revolutions, the social-contract tradition of modern political theory, and the institutional secularism of the modern state.
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