The Age of Enlightenment
• The eighteenth century’s own name for this
movement was “the Enlightenment”—les 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
• Philosophes—the thinkers who aspired to examine
and reform human institutions—were 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.
1:The 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.
• 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.
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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 powers—if the
same body both prosecutes and judges, for example—
liberty is lost. In a good government, one power
balances and checks another power, an argument that
impressed the framers of the United States
Constitution.
• 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
• 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.
• 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.
3:Famous 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Locke’s 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
arbitrarily—if it violated the natural rights of the
individual—it reneged on its contract had forfeited
the loyalty of its subjects.
• 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.
• 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, senseexperience was a sequence of disjointed impressions,
upon which the mind-and the mind alone-imposed
regularities, patterns, connections.
• 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.
4:The 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 selfsufficiency of the human intellect.
• 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.
• 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.