11.6: The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was a philosophical movement in the eighteenth century composed of intellectuals who were greatly impressed with the achievements of the Scientific Revolution, and concerned with the idea of reason. They hoped that by using the scientific method, they could make progress toward a better society than the one they had inherited. Reason, natural law, hope, progress—these were common words to the thinkers of the time.

The Enlightenment was especially influenced by the ideas of two seventeenth-century Englishmen, Isaac Newton and John Locke. To Newton, the physical world and everything in it were like a giant machine (the Newtonian world-machine). If you could discover the natural laws that governed the physical world, then it was possible to discover the natural laws that governed human society.

John Locke (1632-1704)

John Locke’s theory of knowledge also greatly affected eighteenth-century intellectuals. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke argued that every person was born with a blank mind (known as tabula rasa). Furthermore, he suggested that people were molded by the experiences they gained from the world around them.

John Locke's Kit-cat portrait by Godfrey Kneller, National Portrait Gallery, London Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/F...ry,_London.JPG

Montesquieu (1689-1755)

Charles-Louis de Secondat, the Baron de Montesquieu, was a French noble. His most famous work, The Spirit of the Laws, was published in 1748. In this study of government, he tried to use the scientific method to find the natural laws that govern the social and political relationships of human beings.

Montesquieu identified three basic kinds of governments:

• republics, suitable for small states
• despotism, ideal for large states
• monarchies, appropriate for moderately sized states.

Montesquieu believed that England’s government had three branches: the executive (the monarch), the legislative (parliament), and the judicial (the courts of law). By separating the powers of each branch, he believed that each one would act as a check on the other. Because it prevents any one person or group from gaining too much power, he argued this system provides the greatest amount of freedom and security, not for the people, but for the state.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

By the mid-eighteenth century, a new group of philosophers had come of age. The most famous of this later generation was a man named Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As a young man, he wandered France and Italy holding various jobs. Eventually, he found himself in Paris where he became a member of the circle of philosophes.

In his Discourse on the Origins of the Inequality of Mankind, he argued that people adopted laws and government in order to preserve their private property. In the process of doing so, however, they had become enslaved by the government. What then, should people do in order to regain their freedom and throw off the chains of bondage?

In a famous work titled The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau suggested that an entire society agrees to be governed by the general will. If an individual wish to follow his/her own self-interest, they must be forced to abide by the will of the majority. In other words, liberty is achieved by being forced to follow what is best for the general will because it is what is best for the community at large.

Attribution: Material modified from CK-12 6.4 Absolutism and Enlightenment