The present study attempts to highlight the originality of the Romanian Enlightenment in Transylvania, looking at the way in which the pre-Enlightenment ideas belonging to Dimitrie Cantemir, grounded in the ideological structure of pre-Romanticism in Central Europe, germinated into the discourse of the members of the Transylvanian School. On the one hand, the author of the study investigates, for each member of the Transylvanian School (Gherontie Cotore, Samuil Micu, Gheorghe Șincai, Petru Maior, Ioan Budai-Deleanu), the takeovers from Cantemir's work, and, on the other hand, their civic, militant, pragmatic interpretation appropriate to the political priorities in Transylvania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]