Modernity refers to the means by which eighteenth-century Enlightenment political thinking came to inform European civilization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Philosophically, it embraces a shift to humanism and secular reason, as originally exemplified by such theorists as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith. Politically, this philosophical shift became expressed in the ideas of popular sovereignty and freedom that formed the core of liberal democracies across western Europe and the United States. The underlying myth of the Enlightenment consciousness is that rational thought, science, and technology are a progressive force that results in an increasingly improved world emancipated from irrational strictures, including religious ones.