right to think freely and express one's views publicly without censorship or fear of repression. Voltaire admired the freedom he found in England and fostered the spread of English ideas on the Continent. He and his followers opposed the intolerance of the established Christian churches of their day, as well as the European governments that controlled and suppressed dissenting opinions. For example, the social disease which Pangloss caught from Paquette was traced to a "very learned Franciscan" and later to a Jesuit. Also, Candide reminisces that his passion for Cunegonde first developed at a Mass. More conservative enlightened thinkers, concerned primarily with efficiency and administrative order, favored the "enlightened despotism" of such monarchs as Emperor Joseph II, Frederick II of Prussia, and Catherine II of Russia. Enlightened political thought expressed demands for equality and justice and for the legal changes needed to realize these goals. Set forth by Baron de Montesquieu, the changes were more boldly urged by the contributors to the great Encyclopedie edited in Paris by Diderot between 1747 and 1772, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Cesare Beccaria, and finally by Jeremy Bentham, whose utilitarianism was the culmination of a long debate on happiness and the means of achieving it. The political writers of the Enlightenment built on and extended the rationalistic, republican, and natural-law theories that had been evolved in the previous century as the bases of law, social peace, and just order. As they did so, they also elaborated novel doctrines of popular sovereignty that the 19th century would transform into a kind of nationalism that contradicted the individualistic outlook of the philosophes. Among those who were important in this development were historians such as Voltaire, Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon, and Giambattista Vico. Their work showed that although all peoples s...
