The Enlightenment Vision flowchart

The Enlightenment of the long 1700s was an era of intellectual and cultural transformation.

This Enlightenment Vision flowchart is pitched at a high level of abstraction, showing schematically how the philosophical revolution of the 17th century led to the 18th-century revolutions in science, technology, politics, and economics — which in turn led to the dramatic increases in health, wealth, freedom, and goods in the 19th century.

To put it another way, the chronology shows how the ideas played out as philosophy, then as an intellectual movement, then as activism, then as the working technology of culture.

I first developed the chart for my courses and published a version of it in Explaining Postmodernism. It’s also here as an Excel file, in case you’d like to adapt it for your own purposes.

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