Updated: February 12, 2026
Intellectual Foundations of the American Revolution
To fully comprehend the American Revolution, we have to study the developments that frayed relations between Great Britain and its American colonies in the Pre-Revolutionary Era, generally understood as the years between 1763, which marked the end of the French and Indian War, and 1775, when open and violent hostilities broke out starting with the Battles of Lexington and Concord (April 19, 1775). I should note that I personally believe the Pre-Revolutionary Era ended in 1774. This is because, in my opinion, for all intents and purposes, the Revolution began in 1775. That year, therefore, belongs to the Revolutionary Period itself and not to the Pre-Revolutionary Era.
In our program, Analyzing American Revolution, several scholars do just that—analyze the Pre-Revolutionary Era. For example, Dr. Robert Gross details the lead-up to Lexington and Concord, and Dr. Serena Zabin reexamines the Boston Massacre. I will link both interviews here when they publish.
But long before the dramatic events of the Pre-Revolutionary years, starting with the Boston Tea Party and the Stamp Act, revolutionary ideas were being debated and memorialized in transformative treatises in places like England, Scotland, France and the Netherlands. And although none of these ideas by themselves could have ignited a revolution (as my guest in this interview emphasizes), they nevertheless served as the intellectual foundations of revolutionary movements that began with Committees of Correspondence as early as 1772.
So to better understand this background, I explore the intellectual foundation of the American Revolution in an interview with Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld.
Here’s how I’ve structured this post:
- Part I (this post): The Enlightenment and revolutionary thinking — key figures, ideas, and how they influenced society.
- Part II: Common Sense and Thomas Paine — how everyday knowledge became a tool for political thought.
- Part III: Choice, agency, and perspectives of Americans during the Revolution — concluding with our “Just One Point” takeaway: why ideas matter.
Exploring Enlightenment Ideas, Common Sense, and the American Revolution with Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense transfigured the Colonists’ fight for their rights as British subjects to a Revolutionary War for independence. In a two-part interview, my guest, Prof. Harvey Kaye, describes Paine’s personal journey in England—from his youth to his failed careers—to his transformation and rise in America. Those interviews will be linked here when they publish.
In this interview, my guest Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld explores how Enlightenment ideas reshaped the way Western Europeans and, by association, American colonists thought about their world and reprocessed contemporary and past events based on new principles that were not just for the elite and intellectually minded. In many ways, these new thoughts were common sense for and by the common people.
In essence, long before the American Revolution, a more profound revolution had been reshaping the minds of 18th-century Europeans and North Americans. It was a revolution of “thinking about thinking,” a term that I borrow from Dr. Rosenfeld, and which explains in this interview.
About My Guest – Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld
Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld is a professor of history and former chair of the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches European and American intellectual and cultural history with a special emphasis on the Enlightenment, the trans-Atlantic Age of Revolutions, and the legacy of the eighteenth century for modern democracy.
Her writings and works include the following books:
- The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in the Modern World
- Common Sense: A Political History
- A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France
- Democracy and Truth: A Short History
To learn more about Dr. Rosenfeld, you can visit her academic homepage and personal website.
These two books by Dr. Rosenfeld are not specifically discussed in this interview. We do, however, explore her other works in depth — “The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in the Modern World” and “Common Sense: A Political History”.
Transcript of My Interview with Dr. Rosenfeld
The notes below are excerpts from the edited transcript of my November 2026 interview with Dr. Rosenfeld. You can watch the full interview in the video immediately below, and for convenience, I’ve also linked specific video clips to their corresponding sections in the transcript.
Why “Enlightenment” Is So Hard to Define
Adel: So, please define Enlightenment for us.
Dr. Rosenfeld: Enlightenment is actually a hard term to define because it isn’t the word that many of the people we associate with the Enlightenment themselves used.
Sometimes they talked about leading lights, and there are other terms that emerged in the era, but largely Enlightenment is a term that was created after the fact to describe both a cultural and intellectual movement that was vital to the 18th century on both sides of the Atlantic.
Denis Diderot (1713-84), 1767 Portrait
Click for image backstory.
And I think the closest you might come to a definition comes from Denis Diderot, from his famous encyclopedia that he edited with Jean le Rond d’Alembert in the second half of the 18th century, in which he said, the purpose of the encyclopedia, and we might say for the Enlightenment as a whole, was to create a revolution in men’s minds.
And that is to say, to change the way people think, not just what they thought.
Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which he co-created with Jean le Rond d’Alembert in 1751.
Click for image backstory.
A Revolution of Minds—for Whom?
Adel: When he said that, a revolution in men’s minds, did he mean the elite men, or is the society sort of all of it?
Dr. Rosenfeld: It’s ambiguous, isn’t it?
Even who the men are is ambiguous.
Does it mean people in general, or does it mean intellectuals in particular?
I don’t think that most Enlightenment figures imagined that they were transforming the ideas, for instance, of the peasantry, of ordinary people, most of whom would have been illiterate in any of the locations we’re talking about in this period.
But I don’t think that he meant only sort of thought, what we call thought leaders, or something like that either.
Most likely, Diderot had in mind a kind of large reading public. So, we might think, yes, people who are themselves writers, but beyond that, a kind of what we might call a public sphere of people who were engaged in reading journals, in attending lectures or concerts, largely urban, though not exclusively.
And ambiguous too, whether he meant people across all religious divides, whether he meant men and women, whether he meant people of different ethnicities and races. It really depends on the thinker.
Adel: Maybe that itself was part of the revolution – whose minds it is that we’re changing.
Dr. Rosenfeld: Absolutely.
Adel: So if we put this in the European context, and I immediately think of France, would these be like people that are in French salons, that sort of thing?
Dr. Rosenfeld: So the salons themselves, interestingly, included a lot of members of the aristocracy, as well as people we’d now identify as sort of proto-intellectuals of some kind.
In other words, people who were starting to make some money by writing, or by otherwise operating in the sphere of ideas, something that’s hard to do in Europe before there’s a commercial market of any kind for books and publications.
So Diderot was somebody, for instance, who tried to take up a variety of projects to carve out a living. And that’s something relatively new in the 18th century.
But most of the people in salons, in particular, that he would have mixed with in France, at least, would have been rather well-off and high-ranking sorts of people. So the mixture is interesting.
“In the Salon of Madame Geoffrin” – 1755, Paris
Reading of Voltaire’s L’Orphelin de la Chine
Click for image backstory.
But I don’t think we can imagine the Enlightenment, at least initially, as reshaping the lives of people across all the different divisions of class and social status.
Adel: The impact of the Age of Enlightenment, I’m sort of moving fast forward, and the impact, which we’ll get to in a moment, that may have changed everybody’s lives, but not sort of the intellectual discussions and the beginnings of it. Is that a fair way of saying that?
Dr. Rosenfeld: I think it’s fair to say that nobody’s life in the West, at least, has not been affected by the Enlightenment in some way at this point.
So many of our kind of basic operating premises, the ways we talk about even concepts like freedom and equality are heavily shaped by the Enlightenment to this day. It doesn’t mean that they haven’t been challenged in all kinds of ways and remade in all kinds of ways. But it is hard to imagine the way we live now – democracy, capitalism, everyday kind of governing norms, without the Enlightenment.
So yes, I think you can say that over time, the impact has been extraordinarily large.
Was the Enlightenment For the Elite—or By the Elite?
Adel: I’m kind of going back to what we just discussed about a revolution in men’s minds. I just want to make sure I walk away from this section fully understanding this point.
Was the Enlightenment for the elite or was it by the elite?
Dr. Rosenfeld: It’s an interesting distinction.
Some of both.
Those who were its greatest exponents ran across the political spectrum.
Sometimes it depends where you’re talking about. In some places like Prussia or Scotland, it was often university professors who were in the forefront, people like Immanuel Kant or David Hume or Adam Smith.
In other places, France, they were usually people who ranged from members of the clergy to people who were born to fairly humble backgrounds, but had managed to get enough education to become literate people.
But there’s a wide range of people who might be called the sort of purveyors of Enlightenment.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
1786 Portrait
Click for image backstory.
Adel: For France, Dr. Rosenfeld, if I may interject here, for France, you identify two groups of people. One is clergy. The second one was people that are born into humble beginnings and they rise in society.
Dr. Rosenfeld: And some were titled. Condorcet were members of the aristocracy for sure.
They had titles like the Marquis de Condorcet, which suggests everything you need to know about his birth. There was a wide range of types that could be identified with the Enlightenment.
Marquis de Condorcet (1743-94)
Portrait circa 1789-94
Click for image backstory.
Adel: Let’s say an artisan, a person who is literate, and we’ll get to the period of Enlightenment. I think also that makes a difference, who becomes enlightened or aware.
Would an artisan even know that this is the age of Enlightenment? Let’s say you and I go back in time, they would say, what the heck are you talking about?
Dr. Rosenfeld: So there are some famous, there are a few texts, they’re wonderful to discover when people do, which are say diaries or essays written by rather humble people.
some of them artisans who have in fact been exposed to Enlightenment ideas and take them up and write about them. Artisans, both in the British and in the French context, were often people who had access to the world of ideas.
And so, it’s not impossible at all to find the literate artisan who’s thinking about what we now call Enlightenment concepts or participating in some kinds of Enlightenment sociability, going to a cafe or a pub, reading the newspaper, discussing current events, maybe even trying a hand at writing him or herself.
That said though, this is not largely a movement of the popular classes.
The Enlightenment is what we’d call largely an elite phenomenon, and maybe a phenomenon of what you’d call a small but burgeoning middle class.
Adel: Middle class.
And that the artisans had time, some of them, you said it was not numerous, to think about these things and write about these things. That sort of assumes some sort of stability and wealth to actually have the time to think about this, you know.
Dr. Rosenfeld: Right.
Leisure itself is an unusual development of the 18th century, the idea of leisure time in the working world.
But this is really, you know, really depends a lot on what location we’re talking about in what years. There is more of a public sphere, for instance, impossible in Paris in the 18th century than there is in, let’s take a different location, in Munich in the 18th century.
Adel: Or in Russia.
One Enlightenment—or Many Enlightenments?
Dr. Rosenfeld: Or in Russia, or in Spain, we’d have different answers to the question depending where we were looking. Philadelphia is even different from some other cities in the New World.
So, there are variations that are really important.
Some people think we should not talk about enlightenment at all, but should talk about enlightenments, plural, because there’s a difference between some were clerical, some were anti-clerical, some were university based, some were opposed to universities. Those differences matter.
But if we want to make a kind of generalizable claim, I think we can say that what’s interesting about the Enlightenment is that it’s a pretty broad-based effort across a lot of the West to alter the sources of knowledge, to alter the way people think and get ideas.
And that meant moving away from sort of received wisdom, in many cases, what you’d always been told, what you’d always read, what you learned in church, or what you learned by going back to antiquity, and often in many cases, an effort to rethink where knowledge comes from.
Rooting it much more in the senses and empirical understandings of things, more in reasoning based on those sense experiences, and are willing to challenge all kinds of different truths that had been established over the years.
So I think that’s really the commonality.
Age of Enlightenment vs. Age of Reason
Adel: So I was going to ask you this, but I think I just figured it out. So that’s why they also call the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, because it’s no longer just what you receive, whatever, in seminaries or also in colleges, which also had a huge amount of religious teaching in them.
It’s also what you reason out through logic. And that’s a whole conversation itself, right?
Dr. Rosenfeld: Right. But where the difference from someone like René Descartes, who also thought humans should come to knowledge by challenging everything through a kind of skepticism and just using human reason, is that Enlightenment figures tended to think reasoning without a solid foundation and kind of sensory evidence, the things you know and see for yourself, could lead you astray.
René Descartes (1596-1650)
1649 Portrait
So thinking in a scholastic mode, like the Middle Ages, would lead you to sort of reason how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, is the famous example.
In the Enlightenment, one was more likely to say, let’s start with something concrete that we can see about how people live or about life as we experience it, and then reason based on that. And so that kind of logic alone.
Adel: Is that like the scientific method of some sorts?
Dr. Rosenfeld: It’s a certain… it’s many people would say that one of the interesting things about the Enlightenment is the turn of some of the methods of the scientific revolution towards non-scientific subjects, about turning some of the methods towards how do people live, or what is beauty, or what is love, or what should a family be, or what should the state ideally look like. But using some of the methods derived from the scientific revolution.
When Was the Age of Enlightenment?
Adel: Yeah. You said one of the challenges in defining some of these concepts that we were talking about, defining our sort of drawing a parameter around it, what years you’re talking about, right?
So what is the period that is designated to the Age of Enlightenment?
Dr. Rosenfeld: So like all periods, these are categories we use to make it easier to think about the past. They don’t sort of start and end in a specific moment, exactly.
Whether you’re talking about, I don’t know, the Renaissance or the Cold War.
But if you had to really give some dates to the Enlightenment, its roots go back to the 17th century, to people like John Locke and Descartes.
But really has its heyday in the 18th century, and maybe a little earlier in England than some other places. But we might say, sometimes historians talk about the long 18th century, which means its tale is in the 17th century, and its afterlife is a little bit into the 19th century.
But that’s what we generally mean. So the 18th century, the 1700s.
John Locke (1632-1704)
1697 Portrait
Adel: I asked this question for this specific reason, Dr. Rosenfeld. Sometimes I see that they sort of put dates around the age of Enlightenment, 1687, which is just a year before the so-called Glorious Revolution in England, to the American Revolution in 1789. And I think the answer to that, that doesn’t really work that way because it continues.
Would you also categorize all the revolutions that happened in the 1840s in Europe, 1848? Would they also be in the age of Enlightenment, or are they sort of the product or the byproduct of the age of Enlightenment?
Dr. Rosenfeld: I mean, these terms are loose enough that I don’t think there’s anything right or wrong exactly about giving the later ending date to the Enlightenment.
But certainly, the revolutions of 1848 could not have happened without many of the concepts on which they’re based having originated in the previous century, in the 18th century.
Now there are also some new elements by 1848. The rise of certain kinds of nationalism, the rise of beginnings of socialism – are new developments really of the post-revolutionary world.
But nothing about the liberal orientation of the 1848 revolutions is conceivable without first the French Revolution and even prior to that the Enlightenment.
Was the Enlightenment a Secular or Religious Movement?
Adel: Yeah. I had another question, and I think you answered it.
I was going to ask you whether or not Enlightenment was a secular movement, and earlier you said there are anti-clerical sort of ideas and ideals and thought leaders, and also clerical.
Dr. Rosenfeld: So there, yes, it’s a complicated question.
In some places Enlightenment and Protestant Christianity, for instance, evolve hand in hand.
In other places, particularly in more Catholic regions, though not exclusively, Enlightenment is often set against the Church, which is to say both against the power of clerics over ideas and against the commitment to miracles or what they would have called superstitions as part of religious teaching.
So the challenge when a revolution in men’s minds also means a revolution in the case of Diderot against the teachings that would have been the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church.
That, however, is not the case everywhere, and there are versions of Catholic Enlightenment and Jewish Enlightenment and Protestant Enlightenment as well.
Adel: Yeah, and it’s interesting that you say that because based on my limited knowledge of the French Revolution, there was also a very strong anti-Catholic streak within the French Revolution itself.
Age of Enlightenment—or Age of Revolution?
Adel: The Age of Enlightenment is also called the Age of Revolution, and we just discussed some examples such as the French Revolution. Is that because there’s a causal loop between the two, or is there like just an overlapping period?
Dr. Rosenfeld: Both are the case.
Again, the Age of Revolutions could be said to really begin with the American and French Revolutions, or you could go back to the Glorious Revolution, as you suggested, or even the Civil War of the 17th century in England.
How are they connected is a complicated question, and the question can’t be answered in a simply monocausal way, like people had new ideas and revolutions followed. That just doesn’t work.
However, the Enlightenment does supply a lot of the key concepts and even the vocabulary that’s appropriated by revolutionaries in the 18th and into the 19th centuries, ideas about liberty, for instance, that really would look different in a different era.
So the reasons say the French Revolution happened are much more complicated than simply say the Enlightenment produced it. There are all kinds of questions about social conflict, there are questions about state finance, there are questions about imperialism and its costs that are all vital, for instance, to the understanding of the coming of the French Revolution.
But the very form it took is hard to imagine without the Enlightenment preceding it, and some of the categories of the Enlightenment giving a vocabulary to revolutionaries.
Even the counter revolution borrows in certain ways from the Enlightenment and the counter Enlightenment. So we can find all kinds of links without insisting that one caused the other directly.
The Enlightenment and the American Revolution: What Was the Impact?
Adel: Dr. Rosenfeld, the more I ask you questions, the more I realize that this is a whole course.
So we spoke of revolutions so much. What was the impact, in light of everything you’ve said, this is going to sound like a silly question, but I’m now very eager.
What was the impact of Enlightenment on the American Revolution?
Dr. Rosenfeld: That’s an interesting question, because the historians have long debated whether there really was an Enlightenment in early America, and how different it was or wasn’t from its European sources.
Most people now, I think, consider the Enlightenment’s been very important for leaders, particularly some of the key architects of the key texts of the American Revolution, people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
However, there were other strains of thinking as well that were important to those thinkers.
So again, they weren’t directly taking up Enlightenment ideas as much as combining them with other sets of ideas. And I would argue something similar, that it’s impossible to imagine a discussion of the rights of man, or ideas like the pursuit of happiness, without imagining Enlightenment origins for many of them.
The text would sound different if it had been written in a different moment in time.
Enlightenment didn’t directly produce the American Revolution!
And so I don’t think the Enlightenment produced the American Revolution directly either.
But it’s impossible to understand the nature of the American Revolution, and particularly the actions of its leaders, without some sense of the text they were reading, and of the ideas they were imbued with, and even the socialization and the cultural life that they’d created in places like Philadelphia, with the American Philosophical Society and organizations that were designed really to be transmitters of ideas from Europe to the New World, and vice versa.
Did People Living in the Enlightenment Call It the “Enlightenment”?
Adel: Did our Founding Fathers, such as Jefferson, Madison, later Alexander Hamilton, did they know that we are in this special age? I don’t know, did they even use the term Enlightenment? Is that something that we’re…
Dr. Rosenfeld: No.
The term, the term there, the French talk about the Les Lumières, which is sort of the leading lights. The Germans talked about Aufklärung by the time of the end of the 18th century. But the term Enlightenment did not exist yet. It’s a much later invention.
And Kant had said, for instance, we’re living in an enlightened age by the 1780s, but not calling the period the Enlightenment in any direct way.
That said, I think many people had an idea that this had been an extraordinarily rich moment for new ways of thinking.
And every founding father knew his Locke, for instance. And that’s a 17th century text.
Adel: Some of them had read Adam Smith, as you mentioned.
Dr. Rosenfeld: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, at least, comes out in 1776, the same year as the Declaration of Independence, etc., that read a little bit later.
Adam Smith, 1787 portrait. Title page of his “Wealth of Nations”, 1776.
But books were imported to major cities in the US. Many leading founding fathers had spent time abroad, often in Paris and elsewhere, Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and others.
So the new world was not cut off in any sense from this movement of ideas. And I think it’s fair to say that the founding fathers were quite aware that they were attempting to change history to a certain extent. They were attempting to do something that was going to have a large impact globally.
Now, initially in Europe, it was not really seen as a world historical event, because the place was more obscure than France. The French Revolution was taken to be a much more important revolution when it happened. The colonies were kind of impossibly far away and hard to imagine.
But all the founding texts get printed in, not just in Britain, but they get printed in France, they get printed in other languages pretty quickly. They make their way to Latin America very quickly. They become, you can buy Tom Paine in Spanish as well as in French pretty quickly, German too eventually.
And so you have some sense that the transmission of ideas goes both directions.
Adel: So based on what you just shared with us, American colonists, especially our founding fathers, are receiving information, digesting information that’s coming to them from Europe about Enlightenment, Age of Reason and all these, Locke, Adam Smith. But they themselves are also producing information that’s circulating around the world.
And in fact, and in turn is impacting the revolutions and other things that happened then.
Discover more about Enlightenment Ideas, Common Sense, and the American Revolution in Parts II and III:
Common Sense and Thomas Paine — how everyday knowledge became a tool for political thought.
Choice, agency, and perspectives of Americans during the Revolution — concluding with our “Just One Point” takeaway: why ideas matter.
About the Featured Image
The featured image brings together images of Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld and Adel Aali from the interview, alongside a collage of Enlightenment-era philosophers—Adam Smith, Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, the Marquis de Condorcet, René Descartes, and John Locke.
About This Program
Analyzing American Revolution (AAR) is a special series podcast production of the History Behind News program. In this series, 33 professors (and counting) analyze the American Revolution from 33 different angles through in-depth interviews with host Adel Aali.
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Think You Know the American Revolution?
