The Age of Enlightenment

Bryan Savage

HY 102-016

Essay #1

The Age of Enlightenment refers to the sprawling intellectual, philosophical, cultural and social movement that spread through England, France, Germany, and other parts of Europe during the 18th century. The Enlightenment is often thought of as a time of change but also of tradition. Toward the middle of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers began to apply the ideas of Bacon, Locke, and Newton, to their newfound perspective of life. Locke argued that human nature was mutable and that knowledge was gained through accumulated experience rather than by accessing some sort of outside truth. Newton's calculus and optical theories provided the powerful Enlightenment metaphors for precisely measured change and illumination.

Scientific rationalism, exemplified by the scientific method, was the hallmark of everything related to the Enlightenment. Near the end of the Renaissance, thinkers believed that the advances of science and industry foreshowed a new age of egalitarianism and progress for humankind. The intellectuals, also known as the philosophes, hoped they could create a new society in the belief that education could create better human beings and a better human society. Such philosophes as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, Quesnay, Smith, Beccaria, Condorcet, and Rousseau attacked traditional religion as the enemy, advocated religious toleration and freedom of thought creating a new science of man. In doing so, the philosophes laid the foundation for a modern worldview based on rationalism and secularism.

        Although, many philosophes continued to hold traditional views about women, the Enlightenment appealed largely to the urban middle classes, and its ideas were discussed in salons, coffeehouses, reading clubs. The idea of a “public,” an informed collection of citizens invested in the common good and preservation of the state, reached fruition during the Enlightenment. Curiously, the coffee shop or café became the unofficial center of this new entity. Citizens would gather to read whatever literature was available, to engage in heated conversation with neighbors, or to ponder the affairs of state. What made this kind of revolution in free time possible was an increasingly urban, sophisticated population coupled with the steady progress of industrialization. The coffee houses became the stomping grounds of some of the greatest thinkers of the age. Needless to say, the ideas of the Enlightenment have had a long-term major impact on society and human progression since then.

As a result of the Industrial Revolution, there was a surge in the amount of reading material available to the general public. Literacy rates are believed to have risen dramatically during the eighteenth century, as the upwardly mobile citizenry clamored for more information. In Europe, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were the torchbearers of Enlightenment literature and philosophy. Rousseau was a strong advocate for social reform of all kinds. Rousseau, for example, began to question the divine right of Kings. In The Social Contract, he wrote that the King does not, in fact, receive his power from God, but rather from the general will of the people. Implying that the people can also take away that power! With similar views, Voltaire employed dry wit and sarcasm to entertain his readers while making convincing arguments for reform. He reserved especially pointed barbs for the Church, which he reviled as intolerant, backward, and too steeped in belief to realize that the world was leaving the institution behind. Together, Voltaire and Rousseau are the most well-known of a collective of European writers working to proclaim Enlightenment philosophy.