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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Enlightenment ideals were certainly European in origin, but they were specifically northern, Protestant European in origin at the very widest definition, and for all practical purposes were English and Scottish in origin. The Italians, Hungarians, Poles, etc. had little to nothing to do with Enlightenment thought.

Assuming that Cesare Beccaria ("... widely considered one of the greatest thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment... well remembered for his treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764), which condemned torture and the death penalty, and was a founding work in the field of penology... considered the father of modern criminal law and the father of criminal justice") does not cut it as Italian contribution to the Enlightenment, doesn't your definition of Enlightenment as "specifically northern, Protestant European" leave out a massive hole by the name of France? Descartes and Pascal, Diderot and d'Alembert, Condorcet, Buffon, Turgot, Montesquieu, Voltaire? (And Rousseau, if we count French-speaking Switzerland EDIT: although admittedly, he was protestant) And there's much more if you also consider scientific and technological contributions, though I suppose this was specifically about intellectual/ideological developments.