The Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment or Age of Reason) is a cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe and America, whose purpose is to reform society and advance knowledge.

It promotes science and intellectual interchange and opposes superstition, intolerance and abuses by church and state.

Originating about 1650 to 1700, it is sparked by philosophers Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), John Locke (1632–1704), Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), physicist Isaac Newton (1643–1727), and philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778).

The wide distribution of the printing press, invented in Europe in 1450, makes possible the rapid dispersion of knowledge and ideas that precipitate the Enlightenment.

Ruling princes often endorse and foster figures and even attempt to apply their ideas of government in what is known as Enlightened Despotism.

n France, Enlightenment is based in the salons and culminates in the great Encyclopédie (1751–72) edited by Denis Diderot (1713–1784) with contributions by hundreds of leading philosophes (intellectuals) such as Voltaire (1694–1778), Rousseau (1712–1778) and Montesquieu (1689–1755).

Some 25,000 copies of the 35 volume set are sold, half of them outside France.

The new intellectual forces spread to urban centers across Europe, notably England, Scotland, the German states, the Netherlands, Russia, Italy, Austria, and Spain, then jump the Atlantic into the European colonies, where it influences Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, among many others, and plays a major role in the American Revolution.

The political ideals of the Enlightenment influence the American Declaration of Independence, the United States Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the Polish–Lithuanian Constitution of May 3, 1791.