Thomas Malthus was an Enlightenment-Era British philosopher and economic writer. In his famous work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus argued that, if the population continued to grow, it would outstrip the supply of food and lead to widespread famine and starvation. Together with Adam Smith and David Ricardo, he remains one of the most influential economic thinkers from this time period.  

The invention of the internet has dramatically changed the availability of information, education, and free communication for people around the world. Now everyone with access to the internet has the potential to acquire as much knowledge as they could possibly synthesize in a lifetime (or a million lifetimes). This has opened up human society by allowing greater opportunity and understanding. This sudden widespread dissemination of information may be compared with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. The introduction of the printing press to Europe allowed works of literature to be printed en masse and shared with a much wider audience than would previously have been possible. The telegraph might have been a reasonable answer, but it was invented in the nineteenth century.

During the dying decades of the Russian Tsarist Empire, the government mandated that all education be carried out in Russian, regardless of the ability of the students in various parts of the multinational empire to understand the language. This, predictably, was unpopular throughout the empire and impeded the ability of non-Russian-speaking citizens to achieve in education and improve their lives. When Lenin came to power, he instituted his “nationalities reforms,” which allowed schools to teach students in their native languages.

Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, is most responsible for making the Bible available to the common people. Indeed, all of these men, except perhaps Lorenzo the Magnificent, would have had a vested interest in not making the Bible available to the common people— some, like Leo X, even worked actively to prevent this from happening. The printing press allowed the Bible to be reproduced in large quantities and in a wide range of languages. This greatly advanced the capabilities and potential of the Protestant Reformation.

An interesting quirk of history is that the Renaissance movement arose from the dedicated copywork of thousands of unknown and unrecognized monks, who through the centuries had been making copies by hand of numerous important works of philosophy, theocracy, mathematics, science, and history (and many others). The secularization of learning that began with the Humanist movement owes a great debt to the work of these silent monks.

The Royal Society of London was founded in the 1660s by King Charles II. It was created to advance the collective understanding of the natural world by providing funding to scientists, by providing scientists with a place to meet and collate resources, and by giving British scientists a platform from which to disseminate information around Europe.

Diderot wrote, collated, edited, and published the Encyclopedie in the middle of the eighteenth century. It was the first organized attempt to collect of “the sum of human knowledge” that had been undertaken. Diderot stated that his goal in writing it was to “change the way people think.” He believed that members of general public could be elevated simply by introducing them to new information and providing them with a resource to educate themselves. It is true that Diderot hoped also to influence the Enlightened Despots of Europe, but his primary goal was simply to spread knowledge around the continent.

The first university in Europe was founded in the eleventh century in Bologna, a city in Italy. It is important to note that from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, Italy dramatically led the way in university education. Apart from Oxford and Cambridge, in England, Paris, in France, and Salamanca, in Spain, almost all of the earliest universities were founded in Italy. Italy was the wealthiest region of Europe at this time and the center of European learning from the twelfth century on.

After the creation of the Royal Society in London and the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, the two institutions began circulating scientific journals. This gave isolated academics and laypeople access to the newest scientific theories, research, experiments, and ideas, and was important for contributing to the spread of knowledge around Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

During the Medieval Era, medical understanding was extremely rudimentary by our modern standards. A second-century Greek physician named Galen believed that the humor body contained four humors: yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm. He believed all diseases were caused by an imbalance in these humors, and his understanding spread around European society so that by the Medieval Era it was the dominant understanding of medical science.