The above quotation is the most famous quotation attributed to the French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract. It reflects his belief that man is born free in a state of nature, but is corrupted and imprisoned by the constructs and constraints of society.

Quotation adapted from The Social Contract & Discourses by Jean-Jaques Rousseau (1762; 1920 J. M. Dent & Sons ed.)

Thomas Hobbes was a famous Enlightenment-era thinker whose opinion that the life of people in an ungoverned state of nature is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is usually contrasted against John Locke’s belief in natural human rights. Hobbes would contend that people only have the right to that which they can protect for themselves.

Quotation adapted from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651; ed. A. R. Waller, 1904 ed.)

Mary Wollstonecraft is most famous for her Enlightenment feminist work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; however, she was also a notable advocate for republicanism and a supporter of the French Revolution. In A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft attacks the conservative arguments that Edmund Burke had made in Reflections of the Revolution in France.

Pugachev's Rebellion happened in Russia during the reign of the so-called "enlightened despot" Catherine the Great. It began as a rebellion of the Cossacks and some of the Russian nobility and spread rapidly through the peasantry until it was quashed violently by the forces of Tsarist Russia.

The kulturkampf was a series of laws passed during the 1870s designed to oppress and reduce the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. The liberal and Protestant majority of Germany, under Bismarck, turned against the substantial Catholic minority with legislation that closed parishes and monasteries, forced priests into exile, and denied the church a political voice. The legal campaign was brought to a halt as Bismarck came to realize the political utility of an anti-Socialist alliance with the Catholics. While it is true that classical liberals would oppose the interference of the state in the economy, that Bismarck co-opted socialists, and that student activists were influential in the 1848 revolutions, they were not the object of the kulturkampf.

Hobbes' idea of the Social Contract stems from humans' desire for safety by giving up some of their individual rights. The main example of the social contract is the implicit agreement that people make to give power to social institutions to imprison or confine some people in society under the assumption that, overall, if the freedom of some violent people is compromised the overall safety of most people will be preserved. While everyone forfeits their absolute freedom in this case, the social contract holds that this loss of absolute freedom is accompanied by the freedom gained through societal protection.

The English Bill of Rights outlined the rights of English Citizens, as well as the structure of the government going forward. Among the structures put forth were the preclusion of a Catholic from the throne, the superiority of Parliament over the monarch, and the power of parliament to control the finances of the realm.

The Huguenots were French Protestants dominated for a time by the majority Catholic population of France. Conflict between Catholics and Huguenots led to the 16th century Wars of Religions in France, settled by the Edict of Nantes. Huguenots, however, would later be forced to flee and resettle in other countries.

It is widely accepted that Poland has been partitioned three times (in 1772, 1793, and 1795). Although Nazi Germany and the USSR would divide up Poland in the Molotov-Ribbontrop Agreement, this agreement was never stabilized and never acknowledged by the USSR following the war and is therefore not considered to be a "partition" as commonly defined.

The Chios Massacre took place in 1822 when troops from the Ottoman Empire massacred much of the civilian population of the Greek island of Chios during the Greek War of Independence. The territory that comprises modern-day Greece had been under Ottoman control for several centuries when Greek nationalism flared up in the nineteenth century. By the 1820s, this nationalism manifested itself in open revolt. The revolution was initially quelled by the Ottoman Empire, but the violent means that the Ottoman Empire employed enflamed the Greek people and was widely condemned by the international community. The major powers of Western Europe soon intervened, and in 1832, the Greek nation declared independence.