4.3 The Age of Enlightenment

Topic 4.3 – Explain the causes and consequences of Enlightenment thought on European society from 1648 to 1815

Topic 4.3 – Explain the influence of Enlightenment thought on European intellectual development from 1648 to 1815.

Enlightenment Thinkings

• Three concepts were central to Enlightenment thinking: 

  • Rationalism, a secular, critical way of thinking in which nothing was accepted on faith, and everything was submitted to reason. 

  • The use of the Scientific Method to discover the laws of human society and nature 

  • Progress, the idea that it was possible to create better societies and people

The Early Enlightenment

• After the publication of Newton’s Principia in 1687, members of this generation provided a link between the Scientific Revolution and a new outlook on life. 

• They believed their era had gone beyond antiquity and that intellectual progress was possible

• Set an agenda of human problems to be addressed through the methods of science

Dutch Republic

• Proud commitment to religious tolerance and republican rule.

• French Huguenots fled there when Louis XIV demanded they convert to Catholicism in 1685. (Edict of Fountainbleu)

• Dutch Republic becomes a haven of tolerance.

• Huguenots and supporters start publishing tracts denouncing religious intolerance and suggesting only a despotic monarch, not a legitimate ruler, would deny religious freedom

• This challenge to authority combined religious and political issue

Pierre Bayle (1647-1706)

• French Huguenot refugee in the Dutch Republic. 

• He examined the religious beliefs and persecutions of the past in his Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697).

• Concluded that nothing can ever be known beyond all doubt, a view known as skepticism.

• Known as the predecessor to the Encyclopedia

John Locke & Sensationalism

• Out of this period of intellectual turmoil came John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which introduced his theory that all ideas are derived from experience.

• Unlike Hobbes, Locke argues that people are not naturally dangerous to each other. A person’s mind at birth is a blank slate or tabula rasa. People are motivated by self- interest.

• Contributed to ideas of Sensationalism, or all ideas produced as a result of sensory impressions.

Locke's Two Treatises of Government

• Locke’s equally important contribution to political theory, Two Treatises of Government (1690), insisted on the sovereignty of the Parliament against the authority of the Crown.

• Argued people have natural rights that include “life, liberty, and property.”

• People form govt.’s to protect these rights. 

• A valid govt. is based on the consent of the governed which creates a social contract.

•  If govt. fails to uphold these rights the people can dissolve the govt. (justification of DOI)

John Locke's Philosophy

• There are certain natural rights that are endowed by God to all that are endowed by God to all human beings human beings (life, liberty, property!)

• The doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings was nonsense.

• He favored a republic as the best form of government

Philosophes

• French word for Philosophers.

• Spirit of inquiry owes much to these individuals.

• Group of French intellectuals who proclaimed that they were bringing the light of reason to their ignorant fellow humans

France and the Enlightenment

• France became hub of the enlightenment for 3 reasons: 

  • French was the international language of educated classes

  • Louis XV’s unpopularity generated calls for reform among the elite

  • French philosophes made it their goal to reach a larger audience of elites

Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755)

• In The Persian Letters, social satire published in 1721 of amusing letters supposedly written by two Persian travelers who criticized European customs and beliefs.

• In his On The Spirit of Laws, 1748, he focused on the conditions that would promote liberty and prevent tyranny and argued for separation of powers in govt. and a system of checks and balances like the English parliament model.

• Heavily influenced the U.S. Constitution in 1789 and French in 1791

Voltaire (1694-1778)

• Most famous of all the philosophes.

• Formed a mutually beneficial relationship with Emilie du Chatelet (1706-49), a gifted noblewoman who studied physics, and math. She taught him Newton’s Principia.

• He wrote numerous works praising England and English science.

• Voltaire was a reformer in politics; pessimistic about the ability of humans to govern themselves much like Hobbes. Concluded the best one could hope for was a good monarch

Voltaire and Deism

• Voltaire believed in God, but he rejected Catholicism in favor of Deism.

•  Deism = belief in the existence of a God or supreme being but a denial of revealed religion, basing one’s belief on the light of nature and reason.

• Saw no point in any particular religion; recognized only a distant God, uninvolved in the daily life of man.

• He hated all forms of religious intolerance, which he believed led to fanaticism

Encyclopedia (1751-1772)

• Greatest group effort of the philosophes on intellectual achievement in a 17-volume set

• Edited by Denis Diderot (1713-84) and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717-83)

• Sought to teach people how to think critically through 72 thousand articles by 150 contributors, including scientists, writers, skilled workers and progressive priests that treated every aspect of life and knowledge.

• Followed belief that greater knowledge would result in greater human happiness

• This resulted in a Reading Revolution which saw a shift from reading religious texts aloud as a family to reading diverse texts individually. 

• The Encyclopedia exalted science and industrial arts, while questioning religion and criticizing intolerance, injustice, and outdated social institutions

• Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778): A Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, 1750, Emile, 1762, The Social Contract, 1762

• Rousseau’s Philosophy: he advocated for direct democracy, asserting that true sovereignty belongs to the people. Rousseau viewed humans as inherently good but corrupted by society, differing from Hobbes' perspective. His ideas influenced later democratic principles and the Romantic movement.

• inspired French Revolutionaries and Karl Marx

Republic of Letters

• Cosmopolitan set of networks stretching from W. Europe to its colonies in the Americas, to Russia and eastern Europe and along routes of trade and empire in Africa and Asia.

• Outside of France, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish thinkers sought to reconcile reason with faith

Scottish Enlightenment

• Marked by an emphasis on common sense and scientific reasoning.

• Stimulated by the creation of the first public educational system in Europe.

• Building on Locke’s teachings, David Hume argued that the human mind is really nothing but a bundle of impressions that originate only in sensory experiences and our habits of joining these experiences together. 

• Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations (1776), attacked the laws and regulations that, he argued, prevented commerce from reaching its full capacity. (i.e. Mercantilism)

• Governments should take a “laizzez-faire” approach to regulating commerce because the “invisible hand” of the market would adjust better without interference from the govt

Prussian Enlightenment ´

• After 1760, ideas were debated in the German-speaking states, often in dialogue with Christian theology.

• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), greatest German philosopher, posed the question of the day in his 1784 pamphlet What is Enlightenment? He answered “dare to know”

• Kant argued if intellectuals were granted the freedom to exercise their reason publicly in print, enlightenment would almost surely follow.

• Kant was not a revolutionary and insisted that individuals must obey all laws, no matter how unreasonable

Italian Enlightenment

• Cesare Beccaria is considered the father of modern criminal justice.

• Sparked a criminal justice reform movement in his work On Crimes and Punishments.

• Calling for an end to the use of torture due to it being irrational because it might force an innocent person to confess to a crime.

• Denounced capital punishment as a violation of basic rights, the state does not have the right to take lives.

• Deterrence theory – men are rational beings, so punishment should be severe enough to outweigh rewards derived from committing a crime

Global Contacts

• 17th C. Jesuit missionaries served as transmission of knowledge to the West about Chinese history and culture. 

• Philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz corresponded with Jesuits in China, coming to believe that Chinese ethics and political philosophy were superior, but Europeans had equaled China in science and technology. 

• Voltaire and others embraced Confucianism as a natural religion in which universal moral truths were uncovered by reason 

• Montesquieu and Diderot criticized China as a despotic land ruled by fear. 

• Attitudes towards Islam and the Muslim world were similarly mixed.

• Some Deists praised Islam as superior to Christianity and Judaism in its rationality, compassion and tolerance. Others saw it as superstitious and favorable to despotism

Debates About Race

• Insistence on empirical observation unleashed the urge to classify nature, a primary catalyst for new ideas about race.

• In The System of Nature (1735), Swedish botanist Carol von Linne argued that nature was organized into a God-given hierarchy.

• In On the Different Races of Man (1775), Kant claimed there were four human races, each of which had derived from an original race.

•  According to Kant, the original race was closest to white inhabitants of northern Germany. 

• Europeans placed themselves at the top of the hierarchy above Africans, Asians and people of the New World after 1492.

• European superiority was increasingly defined as culturally superior rather than religiously superior

• Racists ideas did not go unchallenged.

• The abbe Raynal’s History of the Two Indies (1770) attacked slavery and the abuses of European colonization.

• Diderot criticized European attitudes through the voice of outsiders in his dialogue between Tahitian villagers and their European visitors in “Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage” 

• Scottish philosopher James Beattie pointed out that Europeans started out as savage as nonwhites supposedly were

Women and the Enlightenment

• Dating back to the Renaissance, querelle des femmes, the debate over women’s role in society continued to fascinate Enlightenment thinkers.

• In the 1780’s the Marquis de Condorcet, a mathematician and contributor to Encyclopedia, urged that women should share equal rights with men.

• Most philosophes accepted that women were intellectually and physically inferior to men.

• Madame du Chatelet, Voltaire’s, longtime companion who published the first translation of Newton’s Principia into French, argued that women’s limited contribution to science was the result of unequal education. 

• Most suggested moderate reform at best, in the arena of female education

Rousseau and Women

• Rousseau believed that wealthy women’s love for attending social gatherings and pulling the strings of power was unnatural and had a corrupting effect of both politics and society. 

• Some women agreed, but Mary Wollstonecraft, the English writer, vigorously rejected his notion of women’s limitations.

• Doctors, scientists, and philosophers agreed that women’s essential characteristics were determined by their sexual organs and reproductive functions, backing Rousseau’s emphasis on natural laws of gender.

Women and the Enlightenment

• In 1694, Mary Astell published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, encouraging women to aspire to the life of the mind and proposed creation of a women’s college and criticized the institution of marriage 

• Women produced some 15% of published novels in 2nd half of the 18th C.

• Key elements of their informal participation in the Enlightenment was as hostesses of salons. 

• This brought together writers, aristocrats, financiers, and noteworthy foreigners for witty discussions on literature, science and philosophy.