The Promise of Reason

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Chapter 24

• The Promise of Reason

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• Overview

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The Enlightenment

• From 1687 (Newtons Principia) to 1789 (the
  beginning of the French Revolution)

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Influence of the Scientific Revolution

• To apply the scientific method ? experience
  intellect
• ? social reforms
• To discover natural laws
• ? Independent of clerical authority
• ? autonomy of reason

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Emphasis on Reason

• The concept of natural law
• Development of the social sciences
• Political theories of Hobbes and Locke
• Influence of Locke on Montesquieu and Jefferson
• Economic theories of Adam Smith

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Thomas Hobbes

• " that during the time men live without a common
  power to keep them all in awe, they are in that
  condition which is called war and such a war as
  is of every man against every man".

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Thomas Hobbes

• -absolute monarchy based on egalitarian
  principles
• -the commonwealth as a body the King as its head

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John Locke

• Men being . . . by nature all free, equal, and
  independent, no one can be put out of this estate
  and subjected to the political power of another
  without his own consent.

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John Locke

• The only way whereby any one divests himself of
  his natural liberty and puts on the bonds of
  civil society is by agreeing with other men to
  join and unite into a community for their
  comfortable, safe, and peaceful living one
  amongst another.

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• Thomas Jefferson We hold these truths to be
  self-evident, that all men are created equal,
  that they are endowed by their Creator with
  certain unalienable rights, that among these are
  life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That
  to secure these rights, governments are
  instituted among men, deriving their just powers
  from the consent of the governed. That whenever
  any form of government becomes destructive of
  these ends, it is the right of the people to
  alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
  government . (The Declaration of
  Independence, 1776)

http//www.ntpu.edu.tw/pa/teacher/gossens/2003Hobb
esLocke.pdf
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Adam Smith

• 1723-1790
• Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth
  of Nations (1776)
• Laissez-faire
• Opposed to mercantilism
• The invisible hand of the marketplace
• Rational individual would pursue their interest
  rationally

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Philosophes

• Nature of the salon
• The deist view of God
• Diderot and the Encyclopédie
• Notion of social progressCondorcet and
  Wollstonecraft
• New forms of prose the novel journalistic essay

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Encyclopédie

• Diderot
• 35 volumes
• 1751-1772
• Louis XV banned it twice

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Encyclopédie

• A collection of all the knowledge on earth
• Voltaire, Let the facts prevail
• Purpose to change the general way of thinking
• To demonstrate how the everyday applications of
  science could promote progress and alleviate all
  forms of human misery.

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Progress

• Condorcet (1743-1794)
• The real advantages that should result from this
  progress, of which we can entertain a hope that
  is almost a certainty, can have no other term
  than that of the absolute perfection of the human
  race . . . .
• (Fiero 611)

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Progress

• Pope (1688-1744)
• WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT
• (Fiero 614)

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Progress

• Result a cult of utility
• Advances in science and technology
• Social reforms
• Tyranny and injustice challenged
• (Fiero
  619)

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Woman

• Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
• The argument men consider females rather as
  women than human creatures. Women receive a
  false system of education that teaches them to
  sacrifice strength and usefulness to beauty so
  that they could please men.

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• The End