10.5: The Radical Enlightenment

Historians have created a term to describe the ideas too scandalous for mainstream philosophes to support: Radical Enlightenment. One example is the emergence of Freemasonry, a "secret" group of like-minded Enlightenment thinkers who gathered in "lodges" to discuss philosophy, make political connections, and socialize.

Some Masonic lodges were associated with the vast underground world of illegal publishers and smugglers. In areas with relatively relaxed censorship like the Netherlands and Switzerland, numerous small printing presses operated throughout the 18th Century, cranking out illegal literature. Some of this literature consisted of the banned works of major philosophes, but much of it was simply pirated and "dumbed-down" versions of things like the Encyclopedia. This illegal industry supplied the reading public, especially those people with little money to spend on books, with their essential access to Enlightenment thought.

For example, an actual volume of the Encyclopedia was much too expensive for a common artisan or merchant to afford. However, such a person could afford a pamphlet-sized, pirated copy of several of the articles that might interest him/her. Likewise, many written works outside of the acceptable bounds of legal publishing (including outright attacks on Christianity as well as pornography) were published and smuggled into places like France, England, and Prussia using underground publishing houses.

Generally, the Radical Enlightenment made mainstream Enlightenment ideas more accessible to more of European society as a whole than they would have been otherwise.