And yet the radical enlighteners have been pushed into the margins of memory and the footnotes of the history of thought. The Enlightenment is, in our common school understanding at least, the history of a cult of reason whose high priests were Immanuel Kant and Voltaire, not the huge intellectual revolution of Diderot and his friends. Their relative obscurity is not an unsolvable mystery if one compares their thinking to that of Voltaire and Rousseau, who criticized absolutist excess but not the authoritarian rule of the few over the many; they attacked the Church but sung the praises of the “highest being”; their views were solidly deist and authoritarian and lent themselves to justifying the power of a new, post-Revolutionary politics. Robespierre made Rousseau the patron saint of the new state, heaped him with praise and had a bust of him carved from a stone taken from the Bastille.