The few regularly cited philosophers, who are often criticized as being mere propagandists, represent a minority of those who contributed to Enlightenment pursuits. The term ''philosophes'' gained currency because it referred to a specifically French membership (a sort of brotherhood, as Voltaire suggested to d'Alembert), and because, unlike references to university or professionally oriented philosophers, philosophes were amateurs, whose society was formed in salons and who wrote for a nonprofessional public. But in common historical usage the term has come to represent far more than a restricted group of French intellectuals (as the term is often translated). Philosophes are no longer only French. Rousseau proudly declared that he was a citizen of Geneva (this before its upright magistrates condemned his philosophy and burned his books). David Hume and Adam Ferguson were Scottish, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were American, Immanuel Kant and Christian Wolff were German, and the Scandinavians Emanuel Swedenborg and Linnaeus's pupil Daniel Solander (among many others) helped spread the Enlightenment in the Baltic. Among those in Italy (where, besides gouty tourists, Enlightenment principles were among the rare imports from the north) were Cesare Beccaria, Pietro Verri (editor of Il caffe, organ of the Lombard Enlightenment), and the Neapolitan experimenter Maria Angela Ardinghelli.

This, of course, names only a few, and proportionately fewer still were amateur polemicists--we find academicians, politicians, and other legal or medical professionals filling in the ranks. Perhaps equally variegated were the philosophes' commitments to pursue different Enlightenment goals. As Simon Schama has remarked of the reformers in the Dutch Enlightenment, they rejected ''a cosmopolitan, Francophone, universally applicable, rationally discerned set of natural laws, in favor of a highly particular, inward-looking, evangelical, proto-romantic cult of the Fatherland.'' With regard to the crusade for religious and intellectual toleration, not all European Enlightenment activists rallied around Voltaire's notorious cry to crush the infamous (ecrasez l'infame). Enlightenment philosophies of toleration emphasized that rational enquiry necessitated freedom of thought and expression, which usually did not mean abolishing God but recognizing that heterogeneous beliefs might legitimately coexist, something that enlightened Europe, largely through the work of its travelers, anthropologists, and orientalists, was forced to come to terms with.

State responses to this varied around Europe. In England the Toleration Act (1689) permitted freedom of worship for Nonconformists, if at the cost of continuing certain civil disabilities. Elsewhere some monarchs such as Frederick II of Prussia (ruled 1740-1786), Catherine II of Russia (ruled 1762-1796), and Joseph II of Austria (ruled 1764-1790) adopted an enlightened philosophy of conceiving of themselves as the servants, rather than the absolute masters, of their states, leading to the paradoxical way these rulers were referred to by nineteenth-century historians as ''enlightened despots.'' How enlightened and tolerant their rule was in practice is much debated. For example, Charles III of Spain has been described as a minor enlightened despot; nonetheless progressive members of the elite in the Iberian peninsula still faced a tough fight against the Spanish Inquisition. . .

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