The Age of Enlightenment

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The Age of Enlightenment
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• The eighteenth centurys own name for this
  movement was the Enlightenmentles lumieres in
  French. The term suggested the dawn of a new age
  of reason and knowledge after a long dark night
  of ignorance, superstition, Intolerance, and
  despotism of kings and priests

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• Philosophesthe thinkers who aspired to examine
  and reform human institutionswere found most
  commonly in the major European cities
• The philosophes expressed confidence in science
  and reason, espoused humanitarianism, and
  struggled for religious liberty and freedom of
  thought and person. Combining these values with a
  secular orientation and a belief in future
  progress, the philosophes helped shape, if not
  define, the modern outlook.

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1The Enlightenment Faith

• To the thinkers of the Enlightenment, reason was
  the alternative to superstition and prejudice. It
  was the only sure guide to the principles that
  governed humanity and nature.
• Nature was a second favorite word of the
  Enlightenment. The precise meaning the
  Philosophes attached to nature was not always
  clear, but to nearly all of them nature or the
  natural was the proper standard for measuring
  God an humanity.

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• Liberty, indeed, was yet another favorite word of
  the philosophes. They were acutely aware of
  prevalence in France of arbitrary arrest and
  restrictions on speech, religion, trade, and
  employment. Liberty, for the philosophes, was
  inseparable from reason. Reason would soon reveal
  the true natural laws governing all things, from
  trade, to government, to religion.

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2, Leading Enlightenment Thinkers in France

• Paris, the center of the intellectual life of
  continental Europe . There the greatest
  intellectual figures of the age met and conversed
  in the salons or weekly gatherings that
  intellectual women of the aristocracy had begun
  to organize. The inhabitants of this world of
  ideas, whether commoner or noble, shared a common
  feeling that they were leading a revolution of
  ideas without precedent in European history, a
  crusade to end the Absurdities and barbarities of
  the old order.

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• François-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694  30 May
  1778), better known by the pen name Voltaire, was
  a French Enlightenment writer, essayist, and
  philosopher known for his wit, philosophical
  sport, and defense of civil liberties, including
  freedom of religion and free trade.

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• Throughout his life, Voltaire was a fierce
  supporter of the enlightenment and a bitter
  critic of churches and the Inquisition.
• Voltaire was a practical reformer who campaigned
  for the rule of law, a freer press, religious
  toleration, humane treatment of criminals, and a
  more effective system of government
  administration.

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• Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et
  de Montesquieu ( January 18, 1689 in Bordeaux
  February 10, 1755), was a French social
  commentator and political thinker who lived
  during the Era of the Enlightenment. He is famous
  for his articulation of the theory of separation
  of powers, taken for granted in modern
  discussions of government and implemented in many
  constitutions throughout the world. He was
  largely responsible for the popularization of the
  terms feudalism and Byzantine Empire.

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• To safeguard liberty from despotism, Montesquieu
  advocated the principle of separation of powers.
  In every government, he said, there are three
  sorts of powers legislative, executive, and
  judiciary. When one person or body exercises all
  three powersif the same body both prosecutes and
  judges, for exampleliberty is lost. In a good
  government, one power balances and checks another
  power, an argument that impressed the framers of
  the United States Constitution.

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• Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 July 31, 1784)
  was a French philosopher and writer. He was a
  prominent figure during the Enlightenment, his
  major contribution to the Enlightenment being the
  Encyclopédie

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• The most important work of the French
  Enlightenment was the multivolume Encyclopedia,
  edited by Denis Diderot (1713-1784), who had
  spent six months in jail for his writings.
  Published in 1751 and in succeeding years and
  editions, the Encyclopedia initiated a new stage
  in the history of Enlightenment publishing.

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• Jean Jacques Rousseau (Geneva, 28 June 1712  
  Ermenonville, 2 July 1778) was a major Swiss
  philosopher, writer, and composer of the
  Enlightenment, whose political philosophy
  influenced the French Revolution and the
  development of liberal, conservative, and
  socialist theory. With his Confessions, Reveries
  of a Solitary Walker, and other writings, he
  invented modern autobiography and encouraged a
  new focus on the building of subjectivity that
  bore fruit in the work of thinkers as diverse as
  Hegel and Freud.

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3Famous Thinkers in Great Britain

• England, had already fought its battles for
  religious toleration and political freedom. It
  had established after 1688 a freedom of thought
  and publication unprecedented elsewhere, even in
  the Dutch Netherlands. It had already had an
  Enlightenment, or pre-Enlightenment, through
  Hobbes, Locke, and many others.

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• Thomas Hobbes (5 April 1588 4 December 1679)
  was an English philosopher, whose famous 1651
  book Leviathan established the foundation for
  most of Western political philosophy from the
  perspective of social contract theory.

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• Hobbes masterpiece Leviathan (1651) set out his
  ideas with great clarity. He argued that people
  want to live in in peace and security and to
  attain this they must organize themselves into
  communities for protection. Although the power of
  the sovereign derived originally from the people,
  Hobbes said challenging the doctrine of the
  divine right of kings and of the sovereign is
  absolute.

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• John Locke (29 August 1632 28 October 1704) was
  an English philosopher. Locke is considered the
  first of the British Empiricists, but is equally
  important to social contract theory. His ideas
  had enormous influence on the development of
  epistemology and political philosophy, and he is
  widely regarded as one of the most influential
  Enlightenment thinkers, classical republicans,
  and contributors to liberal theory. His writings
  influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish
  Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American
  revolutionaries. This influence is reflected in
  the American Declaration of Independence.

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• Lockes theory, in its broad outlines, stated
  that the right to govern deprived from the
  consent of the governed and was a form of
  contract. When people gave their consent to a
  government, they expected it to govern justly, to
  protect their liberty and property. If a
  government attempted to rule absolutely and
  arbitrarilyif it violated the natural rights of
  the individualit reneged on its contract had
  forfeited the loyalty of its subjects.

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• David Hume (26 April 1711  25 August 1776) was a
  Scottish philosopher, economist, historian and an
  important figure in Western philosophy and the
  Scottish Enlightenment. Together with John Locke,
  George Berkeley, and a handful of others, Hume is
  one of the principal early philosophers of
  empiricism.

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• David Hume, who along with Adam Smith was one of
  the greatest figures of the Scottish
  Enlightenment, started from a close study of the
  great French skeptic Bayle. Hume ended by denying
  the possibility of certainty. Only the experience
  of the senses, unverifiable by any independent
  means, kept the mind informed about external
  reality. And for Hume, sense-experience was a
  sequence of disjointed impressions, upon which
  the mind-and the mind alone-imposed regularities,
  patterns, connections.

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• Adam Smith (baptised 16 June 1723  17 July 1790
  OS 5 June 1723  17 July 1790) was a Scottish
  moral philosopher and a pioneer of political
  economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish
  Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory
  of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the
  Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The
  latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of
  Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the
  first modern work of economics. Adam Smith is
  widely cited as the father of modern economics.

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4The Enlightenment and the Modern World

• Enlightenment thought was the culmination of a
  trend begun by Renaissance artists and humanists,
  who attacked medieval otherworldliness and gave
  value to individual achievement and the worldly
  life. It was a direct outgrowth of the Scientific
  Revolution, which provided a new method of
  inquiry and verification and demonstrated the
  power and self-sufficiency of the human
  intellect.

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• The philosophes sought to analyze nature,
  government, religion, law, economics, and
  education through reason alone, without any
  reference to Christian teachings, and they
  rejected completely the claims of clerics to a
  special wisdom.
• The idea of secular progress, another key element
  of the modern outlook, also grew out of the
  Enlightenment. Rejecting the idea of a static and
  immutable order of society instituted by God, the
  philosophes had confidence that human beings
  could improve the conditions of their existence,
  and they pointed to advances in science and
  technology as evidence of progress.

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• The philosophes wanted a freer, more humane, and
  more rational society, but they feared the people
  and their potential for revolutionary action.
• Yet the Enlightenment established a vision of
  humanity so independent of Christianity and so
  sensitive to the needs and abuses of present
  society that no established institution, once
  grown corrupt and ineffectual, could long
  withstand its penetrating critique.