Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) famously defined the concept in a short essay called “What Is Enlightenment?”
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment. …This concept of the reason and right to self-determination of the individual was derived a concept of natural rights based on natural law. Natural law in the European philosophical tradition was originally based a Christian religious concept. John Locke, the English philosopher who was very influential in the thinking of political intellectuals in the US like Thomas Jefferson elaborated such an approach to inherent rights. But, as the quotation from Kant indicates, his concept did not involve individuals submitting their own thought to dictates from religious officials.
This enlightenment requires nothing but freedom--and the most innocent of all that may be called "freedom": freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters. Now I hear the cry from all sides: "Do not argue!" The officer says: "Do not argue--drill!" The tax collector: "Do not argue--pay!" The pastor: "Do not argue--believe!" Only one ruler in the world says: "Argue as much as you please, but obey!" We find restrictions on freedom everywhere. But which restriction is harmful to enlightenment? Which restriction is innocent, and which advances enlightenment? I reply: the public use of one's reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment to mankind. (1)
In fact, both David Hume (1711–1776) and Kant defined natural rights on a secular concept of Reason. (“Hume’s more conservative contemporaries denounced his writings as works of scepticism and atheism…”) (2) Divine beings were not a necessary component of the democratic and American Revolutionary concept, although most Americans and Brits in 1776 were adherents of some form of the Christian religion. (Locke, btw, did not think that recognition of inherent rights based on Christian natural law extended to Catholics.)
This past Saturday, the faithful followers of Donald Trump staged a “Freedom 250” event specifically title “Rededicate 250:” A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving on the National Mall in Washington celebrating the Christian heritage of the US, Protestant fundamentalist version. Katherine Stewart wrote before the event:
The Trump Freedom 250 program is embedded with unvarnished Christian nationalist propaganda. It kicks off with a rally on the National Mall called Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving, which bills itself as “part of the broader Freedom 250 initiative.” The event, hosted by a private foundation in partnership with the White House, has been described by proponents as “a major faith gathering” that will “bring together faith leaders, public servants, music, prayer, and testimony to honor God’s hand in America’s story.” In fact, it will bring together leaders and representatives of the narrow but powerful Christian nationalist groups dedicated to replacing American democracy with a (supposedly) Christian autocracy. [my emphasis] (3)She also notes, “Talk about moneylenders in the temple: For about $1 million, they can secure invitations to a reception with President Trump.”
Commager on the Enlightenment and the American Revolution
Commager looked at the political philosophies and ideologies that dominated the Revolutionary period as being deeply influenced by the Enlightenment, which also included enthusiasm and even reverence for modern science, e.g., Benjamin Franklin. But Commager saw the historical writing of that generation as sadly deficient in comparison to the legal theories and political philosophies. He wrote, for instance, “Of all that generation only the grotesque Parson Weems [Mason Locke Weems, known for his tale of Washington and the cherry tree] wrote histories that survive, and everyone acknowledges that he was not really an historian at all and that he belongs to the era of Romanticism, not to the Enlightenment.” (Weems is best known as the popularizer of the tale of young Washington and the cherry tree.)
However, he argues that the real, substantive historical writing of the Founders’ generation was found in the official documents and political polemics of the time:
For the great historical writings of this generation, we turn to John Adams, Franklin, Paine, Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington, Madison, Wilson, Rush, and their associates among the Argonauts; and the great historical treatises are not formal histories but such works as The Defense of the Constitutions, Notes on Virginia, The Rights of Man, The Federalist Papers, James Wilson's Lectures on the Constitution, and similar statements.But he characterizes the basic approach to history embodied in such documents, adnthe Enlightenment understand of history, as follows:
What is clear, at once, is that the generation of the Enlightenment, European and American alike, thought of history not as we customarily think of it, as the reconstruction of the past, but as a moral enterprise. Perhaps it was not history at all; let us call it philosophy and be done with it. ...1969, the year of the Commager lecture, was nearly six decades ago. Commager was an active supporter of the civil rights movement, an outspoken critic of McCarthyism, an opponent of the Vietnam War, and was very outspoken against the authoritarianism and lawlessness of Richard Nixon’s regime, which is probably the most proximate American model of the Trump 2.0 regime. All of those perspectives were ones for which he also looked to history to advocate for democratic “virtue” in his own time. It’s worth adding here that one of the most important figures in McCarthyism was his witch-hunt Committee’s chief counsel who later went on to become the top Mob lawyer in New York and the political mentor of Donald Trump.
In America too, perhaps especially in America, it was morality that was important [in the writing of history], not facts; it was wisdom and justice, and virtue. Here is the eminent Dr. Rush urging the trustees of the new Dickinson College to exchange a set of the Journals of the House of Commons for books on mathematics. "It would distress me" he wrote, "to hear that a student at Dickinson College had ever wasted half an hour in examining even their title pages. He would find nothing in them but such things as a scholar and a gentleman should strive to forget."
He also notes that liberty and tyranny were early themes in the new American Republic. Although few people today would have trouble recognizing both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as Founders whose actions and ideas deserved to be carefully understood, they became political enemies during the Adams Administration of 1777-1801. Jefferson and his partisans even regarded Jefferson’s Presidential election in 1800 as a second American resolution. A key point of dispute was the Adams Administration’s use of the Alien and Sedition Acts as an illegitimate excuse for political repression against critics of hist administration. It’s notable here that Trump used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as a key legal fig leaf for his deployment of the ICE Gestapo to terrorize and murder non-citizens and citizens as well in 2025-26.
Here it’s hard not to think of that apocryphal quote usually attributed to Mark Twain, “History doesn’t repeat itself. But it often rhymes.”
Commager may have overstated his argument (or maybe not!) that historical facts as such didn’t much matter in the Enlightenment thought of the American Revolutionary leaders and thinkers. But he conveyed a good since of how the past can be used to understanding and acting on the present. It’s similar to the New Left notion from the 1960s of a “usable past.” And Commager understood history in that way, though he wasn’t advocating disregarding the actual facts of history.
His essay is also a reminder that the approach to understanding history evolves, and there are fads and trends in the mainstream approach to teaching history and a lot of diverse perspectives. The Enlightenment was a complex and contradictory phenomenon, as reflected in the title and the text of Theodore Adorno’s and Max Horheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). The Enlightenment was a key moment in defining and prioritizing basic human rights, including the secular grounding the Hume and Kant gave to it.
But Enlightenment thought also found justifications and alibis for colonialism and racism. There was a debate, for instance, between Kant’s concept of race which allowed for the notion of superior and inferior races, and the more egalitarian (and more scientifically accurate) view of the explorer and German revolutionary democrat Georg Forster (1754-1794). (5)
History is complicated. It’s also a moving target.
This is why it’s worth remembering the actual events and leaders and motivating ideas of period of the Revolution and the early Republic. Otherwise, there will be no shortage of religious and political crackpots pimping their own scam version of that history and heritage to the disadvantage of pretty much everyone.
Notes:
(1) What Is Enlightenment? English translation: Mary C. Smith, n/d. <https://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html> (Accessed: 2026-19-05).
(2) Morris, William Edward and Charlotte R. Brown (2023): David Hume. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 11/01/2023. <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2023/entries/hume/> (Accessed: 2026-19-05).
(3) Stewart, Katherine (2026): A Very Authoritarian Semiquincentennial Celebration. New Republic 05/15/2026. <https://newrepublic.com/article/210373/trump-america-250-corruption-authoritarianism> (Accessed: 2026-19-05).
(4) Commager, Henry Steele (1975): The Past As An Extension of the Present. In: Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment. New York: Geoge Braziller. The essay was originally presented as an address in 1969.
(5) Strack, Thomas (1996): Philosophical Anthropology on the Eve of Biological Determinism: Immanuel Kant and Georg Forster on the Moral Qualities and Biological Characteristics of the Human Race. Central European History 29:3, 285-308. <http://www.jstor.com/stable/4546617>
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