The Enlightenment Project

Lemonnier, Lecture de la tragédie de l'orphelin de la Chine de Voltaire dans le salon de madame Geoffrin

This project asks students to use the concepts of network theory to analyze key individuals and key moments in intellectual history. After choosing a major intellectual figure of the Scientific Revolution or Enlightenment (17th or 18th centuries), students determine the different networks in which that intellectual took part. In this way, we seek to understand which networks were important to making certain individuals – but also certain intellectual movements – successful, as well as to understand how these different movements depended on different networks.

List of the intellectual figures whose networks the students are mapping:

• John Adams
• Robert Boyle
• Nicolaus Copernicus
• René Descartes
• Denis Diderot
• Benjamin Franklin
• Galileo Galilei
• Thomas Hobbes
• Thomas Jefferson
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• John Locke
• James Madison
• Montesquieu
• Isaac Newton
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Adam Smith
• Voltaire
• George Washington