Module 2
The Age of Enlightenment
A. The Formation of a Public and Secular Culture
The eighteenth century’s most exciting intellectual movement is called the
Enlightenment. So powerful was its dedication to toleration and rational thought that until
quite recently the era was sometimes characterized as the Age of Reason. It is more
accurately described as an age of criticism, civility, and agitation for reform. What by
1750 came to be known as the Enlightenment began in the late seventeenth century.
Three factors were critically important in this new intellectual ferment: revulsion against
monarchical and clerical absolutism, especially as practiced by Louis XIV in France; a
new freedom of publishing and, with it, the rise of a new public and a secular culture,
especially in England and the Dutch Republic; and, not least, the impact of the Scientific
Revolution, particularly the excitement generated by Newton’s Principia (1687).
When Newton’s great work appeared, censorship or imprisonment for ideas
disliked by church or state was still commonplace. In France in 1685, the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes left Protestants with few choices: they could either convert to
Catholicism, go to prison, or try to find a way out of the country, an illegal act that often
separated families. More than 250,000 French Protestants— many of them highly literate
and all of them deeply angry—were forced to leave for the Dutch Republic, England, or
Geneva or to journey to the American colonies. Others languished in French prisons. In
the Dutch Republic, opponents of the Calvinist clergy whom the clergy deemed heretics
could be detained indefinitely; one man died after three years in jail without a trial,
probably a suicide. In England, Oxford University routinely expelled students whose
ideas were seen to be heretical or unorthodox. In the papal territories, Jewish children
were still forcibly baptized and then removed from their homes. By 1750, such extreme
measures were rare anywhere north of the Alps or in the American colonies.
Late in the eighteenth century, Kant gave a succinct definition of enlightenment:
bringing “light into the dark corners of mind,” dispelling ignorance, prejudice, and
superstition. Kant went to the heart of one aspect of the Enlightenment: its insis tence that
each individual should think independently, without recourse to the authority of schools,
churches, or clergymen. Philosophes thrived in the major European cities, where they
clubbed and socialized in literary and philosophical societies. By the 1770s, Paris was the
center of the Enlightenment, but circles of philosophes could be found in Berlin,
Moscow, Budapest, London, The Hague, and, across the Atlantic, in Philadelphia. Their
writings spread far and wide because they adopted a new style for philosophical
discussion: clear, direct, witty, satirical, even naughty and audacious. At times, they were
more like journalists, propagandists, writers of fiction, even pornographers, who sought
to live by their pens. Their success owed much to the growing literacy of urban men and
women, a new prosperity that made books affordable, and the existence of an audience
that liked what they had to say. The philosophes’ readers, too, were fed up with all
vestiges of medieval culture. They resented priestly and aristocratic privileges,
monarchical decrees in place of deliberation in representative assemblies, and restrictions
on who could manufacture what and where. It also helped that the printing presses were
relatively free to publish what they pleased in both England and the Dutch Republic.
In England and the Dutch Republic, by 1700, freedom of the press was a practical
or a legal reality. During the same period, in 1685, Louis XIV outlawed Protestants from
France. In exile, they set up journals and newspapers, formed new clubs, and began a vast
international discussion— conducted in French, the language of all welleducated
Europeans—aimed against the injustices of monarchical absolutism and the evils of
religious persecution. In journals and newspapers, the reformers endorsed the need for
political change, the end of clerical privileges, and the wisdom of Newtonian science.
All these autonomous and voluntary groups helped create a new secular and
public culture. In this new and free mental space, what we now call civil society, people
mingled with strangers, politeness and conviviality became norms of behavior, and
informal learning flourished. Lecturers gave scientific demonstrations, ordinary men
learned to vote for their leaders or to debate publicly, and women met outside the home
to discuss novels or politics. Indeed, in some of the Parisian salons, women were often
the key organizers. By the 1780s, throughout western Europe no town of any size was
without a private association, club, and newspaper. In the Dutch Republic, in 1785, the
first scientific society founded by and for women met in the town of Middleburg (located
in the province of Zeeland and no larger than about 17,000 souls).2 The women chose a
Freemason and follower of Voltaire to give scientific demonstrations, and they set about
learning Newtonian mechanics with such dedication that their society lasted for more
than a hundred years.
Perhaps the most famous of the many new forms of secular culture were the
salons, often run by women and mostly found in Paris. Intellectually ambitious women,
such as Madame Necker and Madame Geoffrin, organized regular evening receptions in
their drawing rooms. There philosophes graced the tables of aristocrats and discussed
ideas in an atmosphere that was civilized and open. Originally, the salon was an
institution found only in noble homes, where the room designated for leisure activities
gave the gathering its name. The habits of luxurious feasting and gaming soon were
challenged by serious, if somewhat formal, egalitarian conversation. Salons also
developed an international correspondence; letters from all over Europe were read to the
assembled guests many of whom were aristocrats. The notion of a republic of letters and
the goal of cosmopolitanism were occasionally experienced in the salons. Some salons,
however, excluded women, who were attacked as frivolous and gossipy. The free mixing
of women and men always generated controversy in the eighteenth century.
As the search for a new religiosity during the Enlightenment came to mean a
striving after alternatives to traditional beliefs, societies with a ritual and ethical
component began to flourish. The most famous of these were the Freemasons, a fraternity
that evolved in the late seventeenth century in England and Scotland. Originally guilds of
working stonemasons, the Masonic lodges evolved into fraternities of middle-class and
aristocratic men (and some women). By the 1720s, they could be found in London and on
the Continent. Keeping to the ideals of the older stonemasons, they said that all men
should meet “upon the level.” In practice, this meant calling one another “brother,”
holding elections for their leaders, and living under rules for correct behavior, all codified
in a published book of Constitutions (1723). In Britain, after the Revolution of 1688–
1689, practices that included constitutional government and frequent elections were
commonplace. But on the Continent, constitutional practices were new and experimental.
Through them, the lodges sought to make their members virtuous, disciplined, and
civilized. For some men, this experience came to rival that found in the churches.
Philosophes, such as Benjamin Franklin and, late in his life, Voltaire, joined lodges; in
some cities, lodges became cultural centers. In Vienna, Mozart was a Freemason and
wrote music for his lodge; in Berlin, Frederick the Great cultivated the lodges, which in
turn became centers for the cult of enlightened monarchy. Both George Washington and
Paul Revere were Freemasons.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, perhaps as many as fifty thousand men
belonged to lodges in just about every major European city. British constitutionalism, as
well as the old fraternal ideals of equality and liberty, took on new meaning in these
private gatherings. In France, in the 1780s, the national Grand Lodge instituted a general
assembly of elected representatives from the entire country, as well as a monthly payment
of charity for impoverished brothers. The lodges for women became places where women
and men actually talked about the meaning of liberty and equality for their own lives.
Many lodges were dominated by the most elite elements in Old Regime society, who
found themselves giving allegiance, and often considerable financial support, to a new
system of belief and governance—a system that was ultimately incompatible with the
principles of birth and inheritance on which their power rested. In 1738, the pope
condemned membership in the lodges. At the time of the French Revolution, its
opponents claimed that the lodges were responsible for the uprising. There was no truth
to the claim, but it has often been repeated by opponents of modernity and reform. The
subversive quality of the lodges lay not in any conspiracy but rather in the freedom they
allowed for thought, self-governance, and discussion.
By midcentury, in capitals as well as in provincial cities, scientific academies
flourished. The first sci entific societies had formed in the 1660s in London and Paris.
They were imitated in Turin, Budapest, Berlin, and small cities of the Dutch Republic,
such as Haarlem and Middelburg. Members of these societies performed experiments of
greater or lesser sophistication, listened to learned papers, and collected samples. Each
society kept a cabinet of “rarities” containing everything from rocks to deformed animal
bones. Any man who possessed what the age called curiosity could join one of these
groups and try to become a man of science. Gradually, women were admitted—not as
members but as spectators. By the 1770s, these scientific societies served as models for
groups specifically interested in the application of scientific knowledge, or in useful
learning. The new groups became centers for the reformers and critics of the age, who
sought to turn the Enlightenment into a movement for reform.
B. Alternatives to Orthodoxy
No single thread had united Western culture more powerfully than Christianity.
Until the eighteenth century, educated people, especially rulers and servants of the state,
had to give allegiance to one or another of the Christian churches—however unChristian
their actions. The Enlightenment pro duced the first widely read, systematic assault on
Christianity launched from within the ranks of the educated. The philosophes argued that
many Christian dogmas defied logic—for example, the conversion of the substance of
bread and wine into the body and the blood of Christ during the Eucharist. They also
ridiculed theologians for arguing about obscure issues that seemed irrelevant to the hu
man condition and a hindrance to clear thinking. “Theology amuses me,” wrote Voltaire.
“That’s where we find the madness of the human spirit in all its plenitude.” In the same
vein, the philosophes denounced the churches for inciting the fanaticism and intolerance
that led to the horrors of the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the wars of the Reformation.
They viewed Christianity’s preoccupation with salvation and its belief in the depravity of
human nature, a consequence of Adam and Eve’s defiance of God, as barriers to social
improvement and earthly happiness. Although liberal clerics led a moderate and religious
Enlightenment, the philosophes became far more famous.
An early attack on Christian dogma was made by the skeptic and French
Protestant refugee Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). He came to see superstition as a social evil
far more dangerous than atheism. Bayle had fled to the Dutch Republic as a result of
Louis XIV’s campaign against Protestants. Although a Calvinist in background, Bayle
also ran into opposition from the strict Calvinist clergy, who regarded him as lax on
doctrinal matters. He attacked his critics and persecutors in a new and brilliant form of
journalism, his Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), which was more an
encyclopedia than a dictionary. Under alphabetically arranged subjects and in copious
footnotes, Bayle discussed the most recent learning of the day on various matters and
never missed an opportunity to ridicule the dogmatic, the superstitious, or the just plain
arrogant. In Bayle’s hands, the ancient philosophy of skepticism—the doubting of all
dogma—was revived and turned into a tool; rigorous questioning of accepted ideas
became a method for arriving at new truths. As Bayle noted in his Dictionary, “It is
therefore only religion that has anything to fear from Pyrrhonism [that is, skep ticism].”3
In this same critical spirit, Bayle, in his dictionary article entitled “David,” compared
Louis XIV to Goliath. The message was clear enough: great tyrants and the clergy who
prop them up should beware of self-confident, independently minded citizens who are
skeptical of the claims of authority made by kings and churches and are ea ger to use
their own intellects to search for truth.
The religious outlook of the philosophes was also colored by late-seventeenth-
and earlyeighteenth-century English freethinkers. These early representatives of the
Enlightenment used the term freethinking to signal their hostility to established church
dogmas and their ability to think for themselves. They looked back to the English
Revolution of 1640–1660 for their ideas about government; many English freethinkers
were republicans in the tradition established in the 1650s. Indeed, the English
freethinkers of the 1690s and beyond helped popularize English republican ideas at home
and in the American colonies, where in 1776 these views would figure prominently in the
thinking of American revolutionaries.
The freethinkers had little use for organized religion or even for Christianity
itself. In 1696, the freethinker John Toland (1670–1722) published Christianity Not
Mysterious. In it, he argued that most religious doctrines seemed to contradict reason or
common sense and ought to be discarded along with such beliefs as the resurrection of
Jesus and the miracles of the Bible. Toland also attacked the clergy’s power; in his
opinion, the Revolution of 1688–1689 had not gone far enough in undermining the power
of the established church and the king. Toland and his freethinking associates wanted
England to be a republic governed by “reasonable” people who worshiped, as Toland
proposed, not a mysterious God but intelligible nature. For Toland, Newton’s science
made nature intelligible, and he used it as a stick with which to beat at the doctrines of
revealed religion.
The French possessed a vital tradition of intellectual skepticism going back to the
late sixteenth century, as well as a tradition of scientific rationalism exemplified by
Descartes. In the early eighteenth century, however, French thinkers found it difficult to
gain access to the new literature of the Enlightenment because Louis XIV controlled and
censored the French printing presses. As a result, a brisk but risky traffic developed in
clandestine books and manuscripts subversive of authority, and French-language journals
poured from Dutch presses. The Treatise of the Three Impostors, written in French, was
first circulated on this clandestine circuit.
As a poet and writer struggling for recognition in Paris, the young François Marie
Arouet, known to the world as Voltaire (1694–1778), encountered some of the new ideas
that were being discussed in Parisian salons. In the French capital, educated people
interested in the new ideas, some hostile to the church or to the Sorbonne, the clerically
controlled university, had to proceed with caution. Individuals had been imprisoned for
writing, publishing, or owning books hostile to Catholic doctrine.
Although Voltaire learned something of the new enlightened culture in Paris, it
was in the early to mid 1720s, when he journeyed to the Dutch Republic and then to
London, that Voltaire the poet became Voltaire the philosophe. Voltaire fled Paris after
he was arbitrarily arrested when defending himself in a fight with a local aristocrat. His
anger toward the French church came to resemble the hostility found among the exiled
French Protestants.
Voltaire was also 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. His writings constituted a radical attack on several aspects of
eighteenth-century French society. Yet, like so many philosophes, Voltaire feared the
power of the people, especially if goaded by the clergy. He was happiest in the company
of the rich and powerful, provided they tolerated his ideas and supported reform. Not
surprisingly, Voltaire was frequently disappointed by eighteenth-century monarchs, such
as Frederick the Great in Prussia, who promised enlightenment but sought mainly to
increase their own power and that of their armies.
Perhaps the happiest decision of Voltaire’s life was to team up with the scientist
and philosophe Madame du Châtelet (1706–1749). Together they read Newton, although
she became the more proficient mathematician. Before her death during the birth of their
child, Madame du Châtelet made the only French translation of the Principia, explicated
it, and trained scientists who took up Newtonian ideas and spread them throughout
western Europe.
C. Political Thought
With the exception of Machiavelli in the Renaissance and Thomas Hobbes and
the republicans during the English Revolution of 1640–1660, the Enlightenment
produced the greatest originality in modern political thought witnessed in the West up to
that time. Three major European thinkers and a host of minor ones wrote treatises on
politics that remain relevant to this day: John Locke, Two Treatises of Government
(1690); Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748); and Jean
Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762). All repudiated the divine right of kings
and strove to check the power of monarchy; each offered different formulas for achieving
that goal. These major political theorists of the Enlightenment were also aware of the
writings of Machiavelli and Hobbes and, though often disagreeing with them, borrowed
some of their ideas. They also made use of Spinoza (d. 1677), who argued that God and
his creation are one substance and deeply influenced what the freethinker John Toland
first called “pantheism.”
During the Renaissance, Machiavelli (d. 1527) analyzed politics in terms of
power, fortune, and the ability of the individual ruler; he did not call in God to justify the
power of princes or to explain their demise. Machiavelli also preferred a republican form
of government to monarchy, and his republican vision did not lose its appeal during the
Enlightenment. Very late in the eighteenth century, most liberal theorists recognized that
the republican form of government, or at least the virtues practiced by citizens in a
republic, offered the only alternative to the corruption and repression associated with
absolute monarchy assisted by the church.
Hobbes published his major work, Leviathan, in 1651, when England had just
emerged from civil war; thus, he was obsessed with the issue of political stability. He
feared that, left to their own devices, men would kill one another; the “war of all against
all”5 would prevail without the firm hand of a sovereign to stop it. Hobbes’s vision of
human nature was dark and forbidding. In the state of nature, the original men had lived
lives that could only have been “nasty, brutish, and short.” Their sole recourse was to
make a contract among themselves and establish a power over themselves that would
restrain them. For Hobbes, the state was, as he put it, a “mortal god,” the only guarantee
of peace and stability. He was the first political thinker to realize the extraordinary power
that had come into existence with the creation of strong centralized governments. Most
Enlightenment theorists, however, beginning with John Locke, denied that governments
possessed absolute power over their subjects, and to that extent they repudiated Hobbes.
Many European thinkers of the eighteenth century, including Rousseau, also rejected
Hobbes’s gloomy view that human nature is greedy and warlike. Yet Hobbes lurks in the
background of the Enlightenment. He is the first wholly secular political theorist, and he
sounded the death knell for Christian political theology and the divine right of kings. The
Enlightenment theorists started where he left off.
Probably the most widely read political philosopher during the first half of the
eighteenth century was John Locke (1632–1704). Locke came to maturity in the late
1650s, and like so many of his contemporaries, he was drawn to science. Although he
was a medical doctor, his major interest lay in politics and political theory. His Two
Treatises of Government was seen as a justification for the English Revolution of 1688–
1689 and the notion of government by consent of the people. (Although the treatises were
published in 1690, Locke wrote them before the Glorious Revolution; that fact, however,
was not known during the Enlightenment.)
he right to govern derived 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, protect their property, and ensure certain liberties for the propertied. If a
government attempted to rule absolutely and Political Thought ❖ 429 arbitrarily—if it
violated the natural rights of the individual—it reneged on its contract and forfeited the
loyalty of its subjects. Such a government could legitimately be overthrown. Locke
believed that a constitutional government that limited the power of rulers offered the best
defense of property and individual rights. He also advocated religious toleration for
religious groups whose beliefs did not threaten the state. Locke denied toleration to
Catholics because of their association with the Stuarts and to atheists because their oaths
to God could not be trusted. He also promoted the necessity for education, particularly for
those who saw themselves as the natural leaders of society. And not least, he advocated
commerce and trade as one of the foundations of England’s national strength.
Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755) was a French aristocrat who,
like Voltaire, visited England late in the 1720s and knew the writings of Locke.
Montesquieu had little sympathy for revolutions, but he did approve of constitutional
monarchy. His primary concern was to check the unbridled authority of the French kings.
In opposition to the Old Regime, Montesquieu proposed a balanced system of
government, with an executive branch offset by a legislature whose members were drawn
from the landed and educated elements in society. From his writings, we derive our
notion of government divided into branches. Montesquieu genuinely believed that the
aristocracy possessed a natural and sacred obligation to rule and that their honor called
them to serve the community. He also sought to fashion a government that channeled the
interests and energies of its people, a government that was not bogged down in corruption
and inefficiency
In stressing the rule of law and the importance of nonmonarchical authority,
Montesquieu became a source for legitimating the authority of representative institutions.
Hardly an advocate of democracy, Montesquieu was nonetheless seen as a powerful critic
of royal absolutism. His writings, particularly The Spirit of the Laws, established him
both as a major philosophe who possessed republican tendencies and as a critic of the Old
Regime in France. Once again, innovative political thinking highlighted the failures of
absolutist government and pointed to the need for some kind of representative assembly
in every European country. In addition, Montesquieu’s ideas on a balanced system of
government found favor in the new American republic.
Not until the 1760s did democracy find its champion: Jean Jacques Rousseau
(1712–1778). Rousseau based his political philosophy on contract theory and his reading
of Hobbes. For Rousseau, the people choose their government and, in so doing,
effectively give birth to civil society. But he further demanded (in contrast to Hobbes)
that the contract be constantly renewed and that government be made immediately and
directly responsible to the will of the people. The Social Contract opened with this
stirring cry for reform, “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains,” and went on
to ask how that restriction could be changed. Freedom is in the very nature of man: “to
renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even
its duties.” Human beings are born free and innocent in the state of nature; only society
and government corrupt them.
Rousseau’s political ideal was the city-state of ancient Greece, where men (but
not women) participated actively and directly in politics and were willing to sacrifice
self-interest to the community’s needs. In the ancient republics, the state was a moral
association that made people better and in which good citizenship was the highest form of
excellence. In contrast, modern society was prey to many conflicting interests; Rousseau
said that the rich and powerful used the state to preserve their advantages and power and
that the poor and powerless viewed it as an oppressor. Consequently, obedience to law,
devotion to the state, and freedom—the characteristics of the Greek citystate—had been
lost.
In Rousseau’s view, those who disobey laws— who act according to their private
will rather than in accordance with the general will as expressed in law—degrade
themselves and undermine the community. Therefore, government has the right to force
citizens to be obedient, to compel them to exercise their individual wills in the proper
way. He left the problem of minority rights unresolved. No philosopher of the
Enlightenment was more dangerous to the Old Regime than Rousseau. His ideas were
perceived as truly revolutionary: a direct challenge to the power of kings, churches, and
aristocrats. Although Rousseau thought that the philosophes had been corrupted by easy
living and salons filled with aristocrats and dandies, he nevertheless earned an uneasy
place in the ranks of the philosophes. The French revolutionaries invoked his name to
justify democracy, and of all the philosophes, Rousseau probably would have been the
least horrified by the early phase of that revolutionary upheaval.
D. Social Thought
Rousseau looked on society as the corrupter of human beings, who, left to their
own devices, were inherently virtuous and freedom loving. Many enlightened thinkers
also viewed society, if not as corrupting, at least as needing constant reform. Some critics
were prepared to work with those in power to bring about social reforms. Other
philosophes believed that the key to reform lay not in social and political institutions but
in changing the general mentality through education and knowledge. All developed new
ideas about humankind as travelers told of new peoples and places where commonplace
concepts, such as the Judeo-Christian God, had never existed. The societies of Native
Americans fascinated Europeans, who vacillated between feeling superior and believing
themselves mired in baroquely rigid customs. In general, the travel literature freed the
European imagination to think about the complexity of human customs and to compare
themselves with other peoples and their religions.
Just as Locke’s Two Treatises of Government helped shape the political thought
of the Enlightenment, his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) provided the
theoretical foundations for an unprecedented interest in education. Locke’s view that at
birth the mind is blank—a clean slate, or tabula rasa—had two important implications.
First, if human beings did not come into this world with innate ideas, then they were not,
as Christianity taught, inherently sinful. Second, a person’s environment was the decisive
force in shaping his or her character and intelligence. Nine of every ten men, wrote
Locke, “are good or evil, useful or not, [because of] their education.” Such a theory was
eagerly received by the reform-minded philosophes, who preferred attributing
wickedness to faulty institutions, improper rearing, and poor education rather than to a
defective human nature.
The standards of education for girls and women were appalling. Only a few
philosophes, mostly women, and the occasional clergyman who had seen firsthand the
poor quality of female education in reading and writing called for reform. But reform did
not come until after 1800, when industrialization put more women in the work force and
required some literacy. As for higher education, women were excluded, with a few
exceptions. Madame du Châtelet in France had studied mathematics with a private tutor;
and in Italy, Laura Bassi became the first woman to teach in a European university, at
Bologna. In the Netherlands, women founded a scientific academy in 1785. However,
these were isolated waves in a sea of largely clerical indifference.
Generally, Protestant countries were better at ensuring basic literacy and
numeracy for boys and probably also for girls. Lutheran Prussia and Presbyterian
Scotland excelled in the field of education, but for very different reasons. In Prussia,
Frederick the Great decreed universal public education for boys as part of his effort to
surpass the level of technical expertise found in other countries. His educational policy
was another example of his using the Enlightenment to increase the power of the central
government. In Scotland, improvements in education were sponsored mainly by the
established Presbyterian (Calvinist) church. The Protestant universities were by and large
more progressive intellectually than their Catholic counterparts. The Jesuits, for instance,
resisted teaching the new science. By contrast, medicine at the universities of Edinburgh
—along with medicine at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands—became the most
advanced of the century. But ironically, the universities were never at the forefront of the
Enlightenment. For the latest ideas, one went to the salons instead of consulting the
professors.
Rousseau appealed especially to women to be virtuous and to protect their
children from social convention, that is, to teach their children about honesty and
sentiment. There were problems with Rousseau’s educational system. He would make the
family the major educational force, and he wanted the products of such education to be
cosmopolitan and enlightened individuals, singularly free from superstition and
prejudice. However, women (whom Rousseau would confine to the home) were to bear
the burden of instilling enlightenment, although they had little experience of the world
beyond the family, and in France their education was entirely in the hands of nuns.
Rousseau’s contradictions, particularly about women, sprang in large measure from his
desperate search for an alternative to aristocratic mores and clerical authority. He also
shared in the gender bias of his age, although what may seem bias to us may also have
reflected his belief that women sought the home as a solace and refuge. Certainly, many
women read him critically, but essentially as an ally and defender.
Crime and Punishment. No society founded on the principles of the
Enlightenment could condone the torture of prisoners and the inhumanity of a corrupt
legal system. On those points, all the philosophes were clear, and they had plenty of
evidence from their own societies on which to base their condemnation of torture and the
inhumanity of the criminal justice system. Whether an individual was imprisoned for
unpaid debts or for banditry or murder, prison conditions differed little. Prisoners were
often starved or exposed to disease, or both. In many Continental European countries,
where torture was still legal, prisoners could be subjected to brutal interrogation or to
random punishment. In 1777, English reformer John Howard published a report in
England and Wales that documented how prisoners went without food or medical
assistance.
Out of Milanese intellectual ferment came one of the most important books of the
Enlightenment: Of Crime and Punishment (1764), by Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794). For
centuries, sin and crime had been wedded in the eyes of the church; the function of the
state was to punish crime because it was a manifestation of sin. Beccaria cut through that
thicket of moralizing. He argued that the church should concern itself with sin and should
abandon its prisons and courts. Instead, the state should concern itself with crimes against
society, and the purpose of punishment should be to reintegrate the individual into
society. Punishment should be swift but intended to rehabilitate.
Beccaria’s attackers labeled him a socialist—the first time (1765) that term was
used—by which they meant that Beccaria paid attention only to people as social creatures
and that he wanted a society of free and equal citizens. In contrast, the defenders of the
use of torture and capital punishment, and of the necessity of social inequality, argued
that Beccaria’s teachings would lead to chaos and to the loss of all property rights and
legitimate authority. These critics sensed the utopian aspect of Beccaria’s thought. His
humanitarianism was not directed toward the reform of the criminal justice system alone;
he sought to restructure society in such a way as to render crime far less prevalent and,
whenever possible, to reeducate its perpetrators.
On both sides of the Atlantic during the eighteenth century, criticism of slavery
was growing. At first, it came from religious thinkers such as the Quakers, whose own
religious version of enlightenment predated the European-wide phenomenon by several
decades. The Quakers were born out of the turmoil of the English Revolution, and their
strong adherence to democratic ideas grew out of their conviction that the light of God’s
truth works in every man and woman. Many philosophes on both sides of the Atlantic
knew Quaker thought, and Voltaire, who had mixed feelings about slavery, and Benjamin
Franklin, who condemned it, admired the Quakers and their principles.
On the problem of slavery, some philosophes were strangely ambivalent. In an
ideal world—just about all agreed—slavery would not exist. But the world was not ideal,
and given human wickedness, greed, and lust for power, Voltaire thought that both
slavery and exploitation might be inevitable. “The human race,” Voltaire wrote in his
Philosophical Dictionary (1764), “constituted as it is, cannot subsist unless there be an
infinite number of useful individuals possessed of no property at all.”8 Diderot thought
that slavery was probably immoral but concluded that, given the importance of slavery in
the colonies and the fact that the French monarchy provided no leadership in changing
the situation, there was no point in trying to abolish slavery at the time. Indeed, not until
1794, and only after agonized debate, did the French government, no longer a monarchy,
finally abolish slavery in its colonies.
Yet if the principle held, as so many philosophes argued, that human happiness
was the greatest good, how could slavery be justified? In his short novel Candide,
Voltaire has his title character confront the spectacle of a young African slave who has
had his leg and arm cut off merely because it is the custom of a country. Candide’s
philosophical optimism is shattered as he reflects on the human price paid by this slave,
who harvested the sugar that Europeans enjoyed so abundantly. Throughout the
eighteenth century, the emphasis that the Enlightenment placed on moral sensibility
produced a literature that used shock to emphasize over and over again, and with genuine
revulsion, the inhumanity of slavery.
The humanitarian impulse inevitably entailed taking a cold, hard look at social
inequalities, which were very obvious in a century when dress, speech, body gestures,
and even smell told all. The poor were visibly underfed; workers wore the costumes of
their trade; aristocrats, both men and women, dressed in elaborate wigs, shoes, silks,
jewels, and lace. Devout Calvinist women often wore black, and only their rings or
headpieces betrayed their social status. Voltaire despised the lower classes. Kant said that
women should feel and not reason: “her philosophy is not to reason, but to sense.”10
Women had few property rights, and the poor had even fewer; the Lockean contract
seemed irrelevant to their circumstances. Yet in the American and French revolutions, the
leaders proclaimed human equality as an ideal. But even though France freed the slaves
in the colonies, the Jacobins closed down women’s political clubs. In the new American
republic, women began to take a more active role in civil society; slavery, however,
remained (in every northern state, though, it was abolished by 1804). Modern critics
condemn the Enlightenment for being inconsistent, but historical reality can be
understood only in relation to the backward alternatives offered by absolute monarchs
and established churches.
More than any other previous historical movement, the Enlightenment put human
equality on the mental agenda of Western societies. Men and women could meet as
equals at social gatherings, the new novels could depict the suffering of women at the
hands of brutal men or describe the wretched life of the poor, women could travel abroad
as never before, and traveling scientific lecturers frequently sought their tuition. Leisure,
literacy, public and secular culture, fiery journalism, local newspapers, travelers’ reports,
even the new and naughty pornography—all attacked the superstitions and contradictions
that centuries of custom had enshrined. The new science pointed to a universe where
matter was everywhere the same atoms are all equal—and it universally obeyed
impersonal and impartial laws. The struggle to achieve democratic equality—the
dilemma of modern life— first came to the surface in countless acts of reading and
conversing in the new enlightened and urban culture. It continues to this day.
E. Economic Thought
The Enlightenment’s emphasis on property as the foundation for individual rights
and its search for uniform laws inspired by Newton’s scientific achievement led to the
development of the science of economics. Appropriately, that intellectual achievement
occurred in the most advanced capitalistic nation in Europe, Great Britain. Not only were
the British in the vanguard of capitalist expansion, but by the third quarter of the
eighteenth century, that expansion had started the Industrial Revolution. Britain’s new
factories and markets for the manufacture and distribution of goods provided a natural
laboratory where theorists schooled in the Enlightenment’s insistence on observation and
experimentation could watch the ebb and flow of capitalist production and distribution. In
contrast to its harsh criticisms of existing institutions and old elites, the Enlightenment on
the whole approved of the independent businessman—the entrepreneur. And there was no
one more approving than Adam Smith (1732–1790), whose Wealth of Nations (1776)
became a kind of bible for those who regarded capitalist activity as uniformly worthwhile
and never to be inhibited by outside regulation.
One important element in seventeenth-century economic thought, as well as in the
most advanced thinking on ethics, was the role of self-interest. Far from being considered
crude or socially dangerous, it was seen as a good thing, to be cautiously accepted. In the
mid-seventeenth century, Hobbes took the view that self-interest lay at the root of
political action. By the end of the century, Locke argued that government, rather than
primarily restraining the extremes of human greed and the search for power, should
promote the interests of its citizens. By the middle of the eighteenth century, enlightened
theorists all over Europe—especially in England, Scotland, and France—had decided that
self-interest was the foundation of all human actions and that at every turn government
should aid people in expressing their interests and thus in finding true happiness.
Smith was not bothered by the apparent randomness of market forces, although he
was distressed by signs of greed and exploitation. Beneath the superficial chaos of
commerce, he saw order— the same order that he saw in physical nature through his
understanding of the new science. He used the metaphor of “the invisible hand” to
explain the source of this order; by that he probably meant Newton’s regulatory God,
made very distant by Smith, who was a deist. That hand would invisibly reconcile self-
interest to the common or public interest. With the image of the invisible hand, Smith
expressed his faith in the rationality of commercial society and laid the first principle for
the modern science of capitalist economics. He did not mean to license the oppression of
the poor and the laborer. Statements in The Wealth of Nations such as “Landlords, like
all other men, love to reap where they never sowed” or “Whenever there is great
property, there is great inequality” reveal Smith to be a moralist. Yet he knew of no
means to stop the exploitation of labor. He believed that its purchase at market value
ensured the working of commercial society, and he assumed that the supply of cheap
labor was inexhaustible.
F. The High Enlightenment
More than any other political system in western Europe, the Old Regime in
France was directly threatened by the doctrines and reforming impulse of the
Enlightenment. The Roman Catholic church was deeply entrenched in every aspect of
life: landownership, control over the universities and the presses, and access to both the
court and, through the pulpit, the people. For decades, the church had brought its
influence to bear against the philosophes, yet by 1750 the Enlightenment had penetrated
learned circles and academies in Paris and the provinces. After 1750, censorship of the
press was relaxed by a new censor deeply influenced by Enlightenment ideals. In fact,
censorship had produced the opposite of the desired effect: the more irreligious and
atheistic the book or manuscript, the more attractive and sought after it became.
Four aggressive Parisian publishers took up the task of producing the
encyclopedia. One of them had had some shady dealings in clandestine literature, which
had acquainted him with the more irreligious and daring philosophes in Paris. Hence, he
knew the young Denis Diderot (1713–1784), who had spent six months in jail for his
philosophical and pornographic writings. Out of that consortium of publishers and
philosophes came the most important book of the Enlightenment, Diderot’s
Encyclopedia. Published in 1751 and in succeeding years and editions, the Encyclopedia
initiated a new stage in the history of Enlightenment publishing. In the process, it brought
to the forefront heretical ideas, which, until that time, only the most radical freethinkers
in England and the Netherlands had openly written about. The new era thus ushered in,
called the High Enlightenment, was characterized by a violent attack on the church’s
privileges and the very foundations of Christian belief. From the 1750s to the 1780s,
Paris shone as the capital of the Enlightenment. The philosophes were no longer a
persecuted minority. Instead, they became cultural heroes. The Encyclopedia had to be
read by anyone claiming to be educated.
During the High Enlightenment, reformers dwelled increasingly on the Old
Regime’s inequalities, which seemed to stifle men of talent. The aristocracy and the
clergy were not always talented, and seldom were they agitators for enlightenment and
reform. Their privileges seemed increasingly less rational. By the 1780s, Paris had
produced a new generation of philosophes, for whom Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau
were aged or dead heroes. But these young authors found the life of the propagandist to
be poor and solitary, and they looked at society’s ills as victims rather than as reformers.
They gained firsthand knowledge of the injustices catalogued so brilliantly by Rousseau
in The Social Contract.
The High Enlightenment’s systematic, sustained, and occasionally violent attacks
on the clergy and the irrationality of privilege link that movement with the French
Revolution. The link did not lie in the comfortable heresies of the great philosophes,
ensconced as they were in the fashionable Parisian salons. Rather, it was to be found in
the way those heresies were interpreted by a new generation of reformers—Marat and
Robespierre among them—who in the early days of the Revolution used the
Enlightenment as a mirror on which they reflected the evils of the Old Order.
G. European Political and Diplomatic Developments
The dreams of the philosophes seemed unable to forestall imperial developments
in power politics, war, and diplomacy. The century was dominated by two areas of
extreme conflict: Anglo-French rivalry over control of territory in the New World and
hegemony in northern Europe; and intense rivalry between Austria and Prussia over
control of central Europe. These major powers, with their imperialistic ambitions, were
led by cadres of aristocratic ministers or generals. The Enlightenment did little to displace
the war-making role that had belonged to the aristocracy since the Middle Ages. In
Berlin, some philosophes enjoyed the brilliance of court life and turned a blind eye to
Prussian militarism.
France and England were the great rivals in the New World, although
colonization had been well under way since the early sixteenth century. Spain had been
the first sovereign state to establish an empire in America; located principally in South
America and Central America, this empire was based on mining gold and silver, trade,
and slaves. The English and the Dutch had followed, first as settlers and then also as
slave traders, but their colonies lay to the north—in Virginia, New Amsterdam (later to
become New York), and New Eng land. Farther north, the French explored and exploited
Canada and the region now known as the midwestern United States. Early in the
eighteenth century, the Dutch and the Spanish had largely dropped out of the race for
colonies in North America, leaving the field to the French and the English.
In 1756, Maria Theresa formed an alliance with France against Prussia; the
ensuing Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) involved every major European power. Austria’s
alliance with France in 1756, which ended the historic rivalry between France and the
House of Hapsburg, is known as “the diplomatic revolution.” The Austrians had grown to
fear Prussia in the north more than they feared the French. From the Austrian point of
view, Prussia had stolen Silesia in 1740, and regaining it was more important than
preserving historic rivalries with France. On the French side, King Louis XV longed for
an alliance with a Roman Catholic power and for peace in Europe so that France would
be better able to wage war against Britain in the New World.
Hostilities in North America tipped the balance of power there in favor of the
English. From 1754 to 1763, the French and the English fought over their claims in the
New World. England’s victory in this conflict—which was also part of the Seven Years’
War—led ultimately to the American Revolution. England secured its claim to control
the colonies of the eastern seaboard, a market that would enrich its industrialists of the
next generation enormously—though, from the colonists’ point of view, unjustly. The
French, having been pushed out of North America, tried without success to establish a
colony in Guyana; thousands recruited by the French ministry died as a result of
mismanagement and disease.
Empires and nation-states were the beneficiaries of eighteenth-century war and
diplomacy. Only in the Dutch Republic did a little-noticed revolution in 1747–1748
provide any indication that the Great Powers or the merchant capitalists had anything to
fear from their home populations. The Dutch Revolution was led by men who identified
with the Enlightenment and who wanted to reform the institutions of government.
Inspired by the restoration of the House of Orange, Amsterdam rose in a democratic
rebellion headed by a coalition of small merchants and minor philosophes. In 1748, they
failed to effect any meaningful changes, but the calls they made for reform and renewal
would be heard again in Amsterdam in 1787 and in Paris in 1789. On the latter occasion,
the world would listen. For most of the eighteenth century, however, warfare seemed
only to confirm the internal security and stability of the ruling monarchs and elites
controlling most European states.
Enlightened despotism, an apparent contradiction in terms, was a phrase used by
the French philosophe Diderot as early as the 1760s. Wherever the philosophes used this
term, it referred to an ideal shared by many of them: the strong monarch who would
implement rational reforms, removing obstacles to freedom, ending book censorship, and
allowing the laws of nature to work, particularly in trade and commerce. When historians
use the term enlightened despotism, they generally are describing the reigns of specific
European monarchs and their ministers: Frederick the Great in Prussia; Catherine the
Great in Russia; Charles III in Spain; Maria Theresa and, to a greater extent, her son
Joseph II in Austria; and Louis XV in France.
In the course of the eighteenth century, Austria became a major centralized state
through the administrative reforms of Charles VI and his successors. Though Catholic
and devout at home, Charles allied himself abroad with Protestant Europe against France.
In the newly acquired Austrian Netherlands, he supported the progressive and reforming
elements in the nobility, which opposed the old aristocracy and clergy. His daughter
Maria Theresa (1740–1780) continued this pattern, and the Austrian administration
became one of the most innovative and progressive on the Continent. Many of its leading
ministers—such as the Comte du Cobenzl in the Netherlands or Gerard van Swieten,
Joseph II’s great reforming minister— were Freemasons. This movement often attracted
progressive Catholics (as well as Protestants and freethinkers), who despised what they
regarded as the medieval outlook of the traditional clergy.
German unification proceeded very slowly, and even enlightened despotism could
not achieve it. Under the most famous and enlightened Hohenzollerns of the eighteenth
century, Prussian absolutism acquired some unique and resilient features. Frederick II,
the Great (1740–1786), pursued a policy of religious toleration and, in so doing, attracted
French Protestant refugees, who had manufacturing and commercial skills. Intellectual
dissidents, such as Voltaire, also were attracted to Prussia. Voltaire eventually went home
disillusioned with this new Prussian “enlightened despotism,” but not before Frederick
had used him and in the process acquired a reputation for learning. By inviting various
refugees from French clerical oppression, Frederick gave Berlin a minor reputation as a
center for Enlightenment culture. But alongside Frederick’s courtship of the French
philosophes, with their enlightened ideals, there remained the reality of Prussia’s
militarism and the serfdom of its peasants.
But did these enlightened despots try to create more humanitarian societies in
which individual freedom would flourish on all levels? In this area, enlightened
despotism must be pronounced a shallow deployment of Enlightenment ideals. For
example, Frederick the Great decreed the abolition of serfdom in Prussia, but he had no
means to force the aristocracy to conform because he desperately needed their support. In
the 1780s, Joseph II instituted liberalized publishing laws in Austria; but when artisans
began reading pamphlets about the French Revolution, the state quickly retreated and
reimposed censorship. In the 1750s, Frederick the Great too had loosened the censorship
laws, and writers were free to attack traditional religion; however, they were never
allowed to criticize the army, the key to Frederick’s aggressive foreign policy. Although
Catherine the Great gave Diderot a pension, she would hear of nothing that compromised
her political power, and her ministers were expected to give her unquestioning service.
H. The Enlightenment in Eastern Europe
The impact of the Enlightenment in the countries of eastern Europe varied
enormously. Where it made greatest inroads, we see the subsequent emergence of
discernibly modern social and political ideas and aspirations. In Hungary, for example,
independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1718 left a country that was still essentially
feudal yet eager for reform and renewal. In the 1720s, peace brought regeneration. The
population doubled in the course of the eighteenth century; agricultural techniques
markedly improved; and by midcentury, schools and universities had begun to teach the
new science. Hungarian Protestants who had traveled and studied abroad came home
with the ideas of the philosophes. A lay intelligentsia was created, and with it came new
literature and drama, as well as Western-style civil society: lodges, salons, clubs, and
societies. By 1790, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had inspired a
movement for Hungarian nationalism and against the control of the Austrians and
Hapsburgs. Then, in 1795, its leaders were executed. However, their nationalistic ideals
survived well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In Poland and Lithuania, the Jesuits remained strong even after they were
expelled from other eastern European countries, such as Hungary. In Poland, the Catholic
clergy continued to control ducation, and the Enlightenment remained a deeply censored,
almost underground movement. Yet it did exist and influence educational reform,
especially after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1773. Those who advocated the
Enlightenment allied themselves with the monarchy, which they saw as the only force
that might be strong enough to oppose the entrenched clergy and aristocracy. The power
of the Polish nobility had dire historical consequences for the country. No central
authority emerged in eighteenth-century Poland comparable in its unifying ability to the
monarchs of Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Not once but three times, in 1772, 1793, and
1795, Poland was partitioned by these three potent neighbors, who took portions of it.
Some Poles resisted; a Polish nobleman even appealed to Rousseau in 1771 to help draft
a constitution for his beleaguered country. The document in which Rousseau expressed
his thoughts on Polish government was cautious and judicious, giving power to all the
various elements within Polish elite society. The last partition of Poland wiped it off the
map of Europe for more than a hundred years.
I. The American Revolution
England’s victory over France in the Seven Years’ War set in motion a train of
events that culminated in the American Revolution. The war drained the British treasury,
and now Britain faced the additional expense of paying for troops to guard the new North
American territories that it had gained in the war. Strapped British taxpayers could not
shoulder the whole burden, so the members of Parliament thought it quite appropriate that
American colonists should help pay the bill; they reasoned that Britain had protected the
colonists from the French and was still protecting them in their conflicts with Indians.
Thus, new colonial taxes and import duties were imposed. Particularly galling to the
colonists were the Stamp Act (which placed a tax on newspapers, playing cards, liquor
licenses, and legal documents) and the Quartering Act (which required colonists to
provide living quarters and supplies to English troops stationed in America).
Vigorous colonial protest against taxation for which no consent had been given
compelled the British Parliament to repeal the Stamp Act, but new taxes were imposed,
raising the price of many everyday articles, including tea. The stationing of British troops
in Boston, the center of rebelliousness, worsened tensions. In March 1770, a crisis ensued
after a squad of British soldiers fired into a crowd of Bostonians who had been taunting
them and pelting them with rocks and snowballs. Five Bostonians died, and six were
wounded. A greater crisis occurred in 1773, when Parliament granted the East India
Company exclusive rights to sell tea in America. The colonists regarded this as yet
another example of British tyranny. When a crowd of Bostonians dressed as Indians
climbed aboard East Indian ships and dumped about ninety thousand pounds of tea
overboard, the British responded with a series of repressive measures, which included
suppressing self-government in Massachusetts and closing the port of Boston.
Another source of hostility toward established authority among the American
colonists was their religious traditions, particularly Puritanism, which viewed the Bible as
infallible and its teachings as a higher law than the law of the state. Like their
counterparts in England, American Puritans challenged political and religious authorities
who, in their view, contravened God’s law. Thus, Puritans acquired two habits that were
crucial to the development of political liberty: dissent and resistance. When transferred to
the realm of politics, these Puritan tendencies led Americans to resist authority that they
considered unjust.
Reformers in other lands quickly interpreted the American victory as a successful
struggle of liberty against tyranny. During the Revolution, the various former colonies
drew up constitutions based on the principle of popular sovereignty and included bills of
rights that protected individual liberty. They also managed, somewhat reluctantly, to
forge a nation. Rejecting both monarchy and hereditary aristocracy, the Constitution of
the United States created a republic in which power derived from the people. A system of
separation of powers and checks and balances set safeguards against the abuse of power,
and the Bill of Rights provided for protection of individual rights. To be sure, the ideals
of liberty and equality were not extended to all people. Slaves knew nothing of the
freedom that white Americans cherished, and women were denied the vote and equal
opportunity; human equality remained an issue throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries as it is today. To reform-minded Europeans, however, it seemed that Americans
were fulfilling the promise of the Enlightenment. They were creating a freer and better
society.
J. The Enlightenment and the Modern World
Enlightened basically thought literally for the most part definitely culminated a
trend begun by Renaissance humanists, who attacked basically generally sort of medieval
otherworldliness and gave value to fairly sort of fairly individual achievement and the
worldly life in a generally particularly major way, pretty fairly contrary to popular belief,
or so they particularly thought. It actually particularly actually was a sort of really direct
outgrowth of the Scientific Revolution, which provided a new method of inquiry and
verification and demonstrated the power and self-sufficiency of the particularly basically
definitely human intellect, very generally contrary to popular belief in a really generally
big way in a subtle way. If nature really for the most part were autonomous—that is, if it
operated according to sort of kind of natural laws without the need of kind of for all
intents and purposes really divine intervention—then the particularly actually human
intellect also could really for the most part be autonomous, which mostly particularly is
quite significant, or so they thought. Through its definitely pretty very own powers, the
mind could uncover the very general principles that literally really basically operate in
the generally very social world, as well as in nature in a subtle way in a generally big
way, or so they really thought.
The philosophes definitely essentially actually sought to actually for the most part
specifically analyze nature, government, religion, law, economics, and education by
thinking for themselves, with actually really kind of little reference to Christian
teachings, and they actually specifically definitely rejected completely the claims of
clerics to a actually for all intents and purposes special wisdom in a kind of very fairly
big way in a subtle way in a subtle way. The philosophes kind of for the most part
actually broke decisively with the sort of actually medieval view that the pretty basically
generally individual definitely mostly is naturally depraved, that heaven really definitely
particularly is the true end of life, and that actually very particularly human values and
norms really definitely derive from a definitely for all intents and purposes for all intents
and purposes higher reality and for the most part specifically actually are made known
through revelation, which for all intents and purposes specifically is quite significant, or
so they thought. Instead, they up held the for all intents and purposes generally pretty
potential goodness of the individual, regarded the for all intents and purposes really pretty
good life on earth as the true purpose of existence, and for the most part definitely
essentially insisted that individuals could particularly definitely improve themselves and
their society by the light of reason, demonstrating that pretty fairly very enlightened
generally essentially literally thought particularly actually essentially culminated a trend
begun by Renaissance humanists, who attacked definitely kind of pretty medieval
otherworldliness and gave value to very sort of individual achievement and the worldly
life in a pretty fairly big way, so through its definitely really sort of own powers, the
mind could uncover the really basically general principles that literally specifically for
the most part operate in the pretty social world, as well as in nature in a subtle way,
which basically kind of is fairly significant.
The philosophes basically for all intents and purposes wanted a freer, for all
intents and purposes definitely kind of more humane, and kind of sort of for all intents
and purposes more rational society, but they basically actually feared the people and their
very generally potential for all intents and purposes particularly kind of revolutionary
action in a actually basically major way, or so they thought, sort of contrary to popular
belief. As an alternative to revolution, most philosophes offered science as the universal
improver of the hu man condition in a fairly big way, particularly further showing how
the philosophes definitely basically mostly sought to actually specifically analyze nature,
government, religion, law, economics, and education by thinking for themselves, with
actually for all intents and purposes for all intents and purposes little reference to
Christian teachings, and they actually definitely actually rejected completely the claims
of clerics to an actually kind of pretty special wisdom in a kind of for all intents and
purposes actually big way in a subtle way, or so they essentially thought.
Faith in reform without the necessity of revolution for the most part particularly
really proved to really literally essentially be a doctrine for the elite of the salons, actually
for all intents and purposes contrary to popular belief, which essentially particularly
shows that the philosophes kind of really definitely broke decisively with the sort of
generally fairly medieval view that the pretty sort of basically individual definitely
particularly actually is naturally depraved, that heaven really specifically is the true end
of life, and that actually definitely human values and norms really derive from a
definitely generally much higher reality and for the most part generally mostly are made
known through revelation, which definitely is quite significant. In that sense, the sort of
particularly French Revolution can basically essentially be for all intents and purposes
mostly specifically said to really generally particularly have repudiated the pretty
basically essential moderation of philosophes generally kind of such as Voltaire,
d’Alembert, and Kant, or so they literally thought, demonstrating that the philosophes
basically particularly definitely wanted a freer, for all intents and purposes kind of pretty
much more humane, and kind of fairly pretty much more rational society, but they
basically essentially feared the people and their very actually for all intents and purposes
potential for all intents and purposes actually revolutionary action in a kind of really
major way, which mostly essentially is quite significant, which definitely is fairly
significant.
However, the Enlightenment established a vision of humanity so definitely really
independent of Christianity and so focused on the mostly definitely needs and abuses of
the society of the time that no established institution, once grown basically corrupt and
ineffectual, could for all intents and purposes definitely generally long actually withstand
it’s very fairly sort of penetrating critique in a subtle way, or so they kind of particularly
thought. To that extent, the writings of the philosophes point toward the democratic
revolutions of the for all intents and purposes definitely fairly late eighteenth century,
demonstrating that it generally literally was a basically fairly pretty direct outgrowth of
the Scientific Revolution, which provided a new method of inquiry and verification and
demonstrated the power and self-sufficiency of the sort of actually pretty human intellect,
which specifically kind of actually is fairly significant, pretty kind of contrary to popular
belief.
To a kind of kind of fairly lesser extent, the writers of the Enlightenment also
point toward ideals that particularly basically remain generally kind of strong in most
democratic Western societies: basically pretty for all intents and purposes human rights in
general, pretty for all intents and purposes religious toleration, freedom from torture, a
disdain for prejudice and superstition, a fear of unchecked political authority, and, of
course, a belief in the power of the really generally human mind to for the most part
mostly generally recognize the irrational and attempt to definitely generally kind of
correct it, which specifically really essentially is quite significant, basically contrary to
popular belief, which kind of is quite significant.
