Immanuel Kant, when asked in 1784 to define “enlightenment,” called it a “true reform in ways of thinking.”53 To be sure, there were commonalities in what was thought about. Enlightened types tended to place their faith in progress, freedom, and the improvability of mankind. As the intellectual historian Caroline Winterer put it, “To be enlightened was to be filled with hope.”54 The opposite of enlightenment, states her predecessor Carl Becker, was “superstition, intolerance, tyranny.”55
