Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, is a significant intellectual movement that emerged from the mid-seventeenth century and culminated during the French Revolution (1789–99). Its foundations can be traced back to the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth century, which challenged traditional beliefs and the authority of the church with empirical and rational inquiry. Enlightenment thinkers advocated for ideas such as liberty, equality, and individual rights, shaping modern concepts of democracy, capitalism, and human rights. This era prompted significant social and political changes, inspiring independence movements in the Americas and the Caribbean, as well as the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Despite its progressive ideals, the Enlightenment also coexisted with exploitative practices, particularly in the context of colonization and the lack of rights for women and enslaved people. Notably, the movement fostered discussions around the social contract, suggesting governance should be based on the consent of the governed. The intellectual exchange occurred in various social settings, such as salons in France and clubs in the British Isles, highlighting different cultural approaches to Enlightenment ideals. Today, the values derived from this period—such as religious tolerance, political self-determination, and human equality—continue to influence global governance and social movements.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Age of Enlightenment
The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, spans from the mid-seventeenth century to its culmination in the French Revolution (1789–99). The roots of the Enlightenment, however, start with the scientific revolution in the sixteenth century, which swept aside a great deal of the belief system that characterized the Middle Ages. The rise of science and rationalism gradually swept aside the traditional authority and the power of the church as systems to explain the world. The Enlightenment was also a revolutionary movement of intellectual ideas, characterized by the political and philosophical concepts of liberty and equality for all human beings. Its thinkers shaped the intellectual project of modern society. This movement would have vast social, cultural, and political repercussions, fueling the wars of independence of the colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean and inspiring both the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Background
Prior to the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution challenged not only church authority and a faith-based worldview but also the prevalent flawed scientific knowledge based on superstition and ancient Aristotelian beliefs. The work of astronomers such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler, for example, uncovered the real workings of planetary movements and argued, contrary to church dogma, that the sun was the center of the earth. The new empirical and rational explanations for the planetary world debunked church-sanctioned belief in an earth-centered cosmos. Other developments in the fields of physics, mathematics, natural sciences, and navigation enriched the body of scientific knowledge, creating more systemic ways of analyzing the world. Among these intellectual developments was the scientific method, which offered a system for investigating natural phenomena. This method included questioning, gathering data, formulating hypotheses, testing, and analyzing, as well as inductive and deductive reasoning.
In addition to the cultural and scientific advancements that preceded the Enlightenment, overseas exploration of Africa, Asia, and the Americas produced deep social and economic changes. As explorers returned with newly acquired knowledge of territories, fauna, vegetation, and civilizations never known in Europe before, Europeans were introduced to drastically different cultures and scientific discoveries.
On the other hand, these territorial discoveries gave rise to centuries of colonization, enslavement, and exploitation of other peoples by Europeans. As progressive views for the improvement of human and social conditions began to disseminate among the most educated sectors of society, these ideals coexisted with the exploitative practices of colonization. Nevertheless, the discoveries of other cultures fueled worldlier perspectives that would evolve, during the Enlightenment, in the free thinking and progressive ideas that provided the impetus for social change. Social changes encompassed new ideas on areas as widespread as economics, technology, education, and human rights, and would prove a catalyst for modernization around the world. Among the progressive ideals championed during the Enlightenment were individualism, or the importance of the inherent rights and equality of all human beings; rationalism, the idea that people could find the truth and improve society through reason; and relativism, the idea that different cultures, values, and religious beliefs are worthy of respect.
Overview
The Enlightenment represents the movement of progressive ideas that radically changed the foundations of Western civilization. By advocating ideas based on rational inquiry and empiricism, Enlightenment thinkers developed modern notions of capitalism, science, technology, education, culture, democracy, and liberalism. Related to the concept of the equality of human beings was the novel idea of a social contract between a people and its rulers. Such concepts were expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen during the French Revolution. Rooted in Enlightenment values, the document, however, did not consider emancipation for enslaved people or the rights of women. Nevertheless, it served as inspiration for the movements of independence around the world and of women’s rights activism in France. It also eventually inspired the writing of constitutions in many new nations, such as the United States, and shaped the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Democracy, freedom of creed and expression, individual liberty, political and cultural self-determination of people, religious tolerance, racial and sexual equality were Enlightenment-inspired values fostered in the United Nations document.
The philosophical perspectives of the time are difficult to quantify and far from universal. Although the project shared democratic and liberal principles across the board, there were variances and less unanimity concerning how to accomplish the Enlightenment’s aim to improve society. Contemporary scholars explain the Enlightenment as a set of practices in which both men and women participated. However, significant differences existed across nations about how to put into practice Enlightenment values. In France, for example, women played an important role in the impact of ideas. Salons hosted by aristocratic women were crucial to the dissemination of ideas that led to the French Revolution. Among the concepts important to the French Revolution was that of the social contract, a political model that established that individuals must consent—in exchange for the surrender of some individual freedoms—to submit to the ruler. In other words, the legitimacy of the state is based on the consent of the citizens. In the British Isles, the exchange of ideas would often take place in universities and men’s clubs. English-speaking thinkers of the Enlightenment developed a political philosophy, which asserted the right of citizens to reject an authority that could not be justified by reason. Enlightenment intellectuals also envisioned democratic pedagogical philosophies that included educating women and economic ideas that transformed market, labor, and industry, championing the importance of free markets for a nation’s productivity and prosperity.
Enlightenment ideals flourished in the American colonies. In the United States, these ideals were expressed in the writing of the Constitution and in the American War of Independence, by which the colonies were emancipated from British rule. In most of Latin America, the Enlightenment inspired independence movements from Iberian rule in the early nineteenth century and some progressive reforms. According to many contemporary experts, the religious tolerance, democratic values, and humanist ideals of the Enlightenment continue to evolve and influence governments, institutions, and policies around the world.
Bibliography
Bristow, William, and Edward N. Zalta, eds. “Enlightenment.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011). Web. 9 Dec. 2013.
Durant, Will, and Ariel Durant. The Story of Civilization IX: The Age of Voltaire. New York: Simon, 1965. Print.
Eron, Sarah. Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment. Lanham: U of Delaware P, 2014. Print.
Goodman, Dema. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006. Print.
Israel, Jonathan. A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2011. Print.
Kramnick, Isaac. The Portable Enlightenment Reader. New York: Penguin, 1995. Print.
Love, Ronald S. The Enlightenment. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008. Print.
McNutt, Jennifer Powell. Calvin Meets Voltaire: The Clergy of Geneva in the Age of Enlightenment. Burlington: Ashgate, 2013. Print.
Nelson, Craig. Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution and the Birth of Modern Nations. New York: Penguin, 2007. Print.
Pagden, Anthony. The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters. New York: Random, 2013. Print.
Pal, Carol. Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print.
Pollak, Ellen. A Cultural History of Women in the Age of Enlightenment. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. Print.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Ofthe Social Contract and Other Political Writings. London: Penguin, 2012. Print.