How to Use the Enlightenment in a Sentence

the Enlightenment

noun
  • Some sections of the right have looked further back, targeting the Enlightenment.
    — Ali Breland, The Atlantic, 6 Mar. 2026
  • But around the Enlightenment, things started clicking.
    — Darian Woods, NPR, 14 Oct. 2025
  • Faith in the Enlightenment and European progress was destroyed.
    — Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker, 20 Aug. 2025
  • That’s important because before the Enlightenment, few people recognized even the brainy basics.
    — Kevin Dickinson, Big Think, 19 Sep. 2025
  • One of them is the Enlightenment on horseback, and the other is the absolute opposition to the Enlightenment.
    — David Frum, The Atlantic, 25 Mar. 2026
  • Even at the height of the Enlightenment in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when waves took up much of the scientific discourse, the ocean always seemed to have the last word.
    — Joseph Howlett, Quanta Magazine, 15 Oct. 2025
  • The midwife’s hand was a gender-bending invention of the Enlightenment, combining the intelligence and strength of a man’s touch with the sensitive delicacy of a woman’s.
    — Literary Hub, 16 June 2026
  • Both were steeped in the science and political philosophy of the Enlightenment, and in the classical literature of the Greeks and Romans.
    — Literary Hub, 13 May 2026
  • That vengeful justification yielded during the Enlightenment, during a broader societal conversion to an age of reason.
    — Paul Rosenzweig, The Atlantic, 3 Jan. 2026
  • That foundation began to slowly crumble with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, but kept drawing on these eternal truths.
    — Arianna Huffington, Time, 23 Nov. 2025
  • Mamdani majored in Africana studies and wrote his thesis on the post-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon and the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
    — Eric Lach, New Yorker, 9 Oct. 2025
  • Things seemingly stopped becoming enchanted sometime around the Enlightenment, according to scholar Charles Taylor.
    — Abby McCloskey, Twin Cities, 24 Dec. 2025
  • Mokyr's research suggests that Britain was different because, essentially, the Brits operationalized the Enlightenment in the real economy more than other nations.
    — NPR, 14 Oct. 2025
  • But, as a figure of the Enlightenment and thus a believer in reason and science, the former president discounted the miracles associated with Jesus — including his virgin birth and supposed resurrection.
    — Letters To The Editor, The Orlando Sentinel, 28 June 2026
  • More recently, historians have suggested that men did encroach on midwifery practices, but much earlier than the early modern period; and that female midwives still undertook the vast majority of maternity care well into the Enlightenment.
    — Literary Hub, 16 June 2026
  • Jewish emancipation was inseparable from the Enlightenment’s promise of reason, tolerance, and individual rights.
    — Kenneth L. Marcus, Boston Herald, 13 Apr. 2026
  • He was taught by the radical abolitionist Gilbert Wakefield, and his father was a friend and admirer of the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas helped inspire the French Revolution.
    — Roy Scranton, JSTOR Daily, 18 Sep. 2025
  • Or take Deneen, a serious philosophical mind whose widely influential 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, was a kind of 95 theses nailed to the front door of the Enlightenment.
    — George Packer, The Atlantic, 24 Nov. 2025
  • That old story survived the reevaluation of war that took place during the Enlightenment; the transformation of the modern battlefield by mass mobilization and factory-scale killing in the twentieth century; and now, the separation between killer and target facilitated by technology.
    — Elizabeth D. Samet, Foreign Affairs, 29 Oct. 2025
  • At the heart of his critique was a blood-and-soil conception of the West, one rooted—like Vance’s concept of the American nation itself—not in a devotion to the shared political principles of the Enlightenment but in a civilizational identity and an organic sense of place.
    — Stewart Patrick, Foreign Affairs, 18 Sep. 2025
  • The concept of having a press representing multiple political parties derived from the Enlightenment, particularly the political philosophy of John Locke and Thomas Paine.
    — Encyclopedia Britannica, 26 May 2026
  • Some historians have highlighted the influence of John Locke and other philosophers of the Enlightenment; others have emphasized the economic and political concerns of merchants, artisans and farmers in a prosperous outpost of the British Empire.
    — New York Times, 9 June 2026
  • Other European nations, including especially France, also experienced the Enlightenment.
    — NPR, 14 Oct. 2025
  • Historically, humanists, especially since the Enlightenment, have defined themselves against religion generally, and against Christianity specifically.
    — Peter Wehner, The Atlantic, 10 June 2026
  • The hotel dates from 1740, when it was built by Vicente Diego Alberti Mercadal, whose great-grandson Vicente Alberti Vidal, a theatre enthusiast, was important during the Enlightenment.
    — Adrienne Wyper, TheWeek, 22 June 2026
  • Post-liberal Catholic thinkers, such as Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame and Adrian Vermeule of Harvard, believe that the liberalism of the Enlightenment has led to civilizational collapse, and only the restoration of the beloved community under Christian governance can save the West.
    — George Packer, The Atlantic, 24 Nov. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'the Enlightenment.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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