Place
London
Capital of a rising maritime empire. Bacon served in its courts, Hobbes wrote Leviathan here, Locke returned after the Glorious Revolution. The Royal Society, founded 1660, institutionalized the new science.
Thinkers Connected to London
Francis Bacon
Knowledge is power. He tore down the old logic and built a new one based on observation, experiment, and induction.
Thomas Hobbes
Without government, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. He built political philosophy on fear.
John Locke
The mind begins as a blank slate. All knowledge comes from experience. He wrote the philosophy that launched modern democracy.
Mary Wollstonecraft
She took the Enlightenment's own arguments and turned them on the people who made them. If reason is the basis of rights, she asked, why does it stop at women?
Anne Conway
She argued that spirit and matter are not two things but one, and quietly shaped Leibniz's monads.
Edmund Burke
He defended liberty and reviled the French Revolution in the same breath, and so fathered modern conservatism.
Margaret Cavendish
Duchess, playwright, and natural philosopher who argued that all matter thinks, and crashed the all-male Royal Society to say so.
Jeremy Bentham
The reformer who reduced morality to a single arithmetic — the greatest happiness of the greatest number — and tried to redesign every institution by it.
Thomas Paine
The corset-maker turned revolutionary whose pamphlets set two continents on fire, arguing in plain words that government rests on the consent of the living.