Professor Brophy
History 102


The Enlightenment

Introduction:
-the Scientific Revolution: advancing beyond Aristotelian physics, Ptolemaic astronomy, Galenic medicine
-Enlightenment: a broad-based intellectual movement, not an ideology
-“Sapere Aude”

Essential Features
Reason as guide to truth:
-confidence in observation and experimentation (champions of Newtonian mechanical universe)
-the universe is fully intelligible
-belief in universal norms: natural laws, morals, and liberties

Essential Features cont’d
-French criticism of religious fanaticism
-exaltation of tolerance
-critical examination of all institutions and customs
-reformulation of political and social ties on basis of liberty and talent (Locke’s view of human nature)
-human race capable of improvement

Social Bases
-social import of clubs & societies
-coffee houses, salons, Masonic lodges
-merchant capitalism and the free circulation of goods  (Adam Smith)
-the republic of letters, the ‘public sphere’: public opinion judging authority of state and church
-women and eighteenth-century letters

Political and Social Reform
-Voltaire’s enlightened despotism, Montesquieu’s mixed powers, Whigs’ constitutional monarchy, Rousseau’s popular sovereignty
-critique of social institutions: Church, law, government, social orders, economy
-meritocracy, individualism, “natural law”
-the ideal of bourgeois civil society: constitutions, rule of law, civil freedoms, political participation
-the “party of humanity”: oppositional spirit on continent; established force in British politics

Enlightened Minds
-Voltaire (1694-1778)
-Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755)
-Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
-Cesare Beccaria (1734-1794)
-others: Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, Gotthold Lessing, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith,Thomas Paine, Giambattista Vico, Mary Wollstonecraft, Alexander Pope, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, etc.

Conclusion
-universality of reason; belief in progress
-“natural law” and political liberties
-the modernity of  meritocracy
-the influence of enlightened ideas: the intellectual seedbed of the French and American Revolutions
-the construction of the individual self
-“facere aude”