Enlightenment Political Thought Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The Enlightenment was a broad movement of reform that swept through Europe and the United States from (roughly) 1690 until the start of the French Revolution (1789–1799) a century later. The intellectual leadership of the Enlightenment came from prominent men of letters (as they called themselves) such as French philosophers Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and Jean le Rond d’Alembert; Swiss writer JeanJacques Rousseau; Scottish philosophers Adam Smith and David Hume; German philosophers Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; U.S. politician and philosopher Thomas Jefferson; and Italian politician and philosopher Beccar ia (Cesare, Marquis de Beccar iaBonsan); to name just a few. The best overall expression of the mainstream Enlightenment outlook on religion, history, science, philosophy, and epistemology during the eighteenth century is d’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, published in 1751.

Shadowing this high Enlightenment was a low Enlightenment of Grub Street writers and pamphleteers who popularized Enlightenment ideas in lodges, salons, and coffeehouses for a broad and less tutored audience. Also, there were important variations in emphasis and outlook between the Enlightenment’s proponents in different national contexts. For example, philosophers of the French Enlightenment such as Voltaire were much more anticlerical than their counterparts in Germany and Britain. Recent scholarship has emphasized this internal diversity within the Enlightenment and made serious scholars much more cautious when generalizing about it. The diverse eighteenth-century proponents of the Enlightenment shared a general outlook and some basic beliefs rather than a commitment to a single project, as many of its contemporary opponents allege.

In English, the expression the Enlightenment was not used to designate a specific historical period until the late nineteenth century, long after the movement had ended, leading some scholars (still a small minority) to reject the term as anachronistic. The same is true in French (le Siècle des Lumières) and German (die Aufklärung), although the nonhistorical use of enlightenment as a general term for the process of replacing ignorance with knowledge was used throughout the eighteenth century (and before) in all three languages.

There was little consensus among the Enlightenment’s advocates on the ideal form of government. Some, like the skeptical Voltaire, favored enlightened despotism as the best way to elevate the benighted masses, while others (a small minority) were democrats who put their faith in the people, as Rousseau did. A common myth about the Enlightenment is that its proponents were naïve optimists who believed in the inevitability of progress, even though Voltaire, the quintessential Enlightenment figure, openly mocked this view in his popular novel Candide (1759).At best, they were cautious optimists about the prospects for improvement with a keen sense of how slow and uncertain it could be. Even so, most believed that things had gradually improved and would likely continue to do so as reason, toleration, and science displaced religion, intolerance, and superstition. Few went as far as the Marquis de Condorcet, whose Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795) is the most optimistic statement of the Enlightenment belief in progress.

Contrary to the claims of many of the Enlightenment’s enemies, very few of its proponents were atheists. Most, like Voltaire, were deists who attacked established religious institutions and beliefs in favor of a minimalistic natural religion. Faith in natural science as the best means for improving human well-being was very widespread, if not universal, during the Enlightenment. Almost all of its proponents rejected the existence of innate ideas, believing instead that all knowledge is acquired via sensory experience. The locus classic us of this view is John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which was widely read and universally admired by the Enlightenment’s eighteenth-century proponents. The scientific method developed by Sir Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon was taken as the model for the systematic and reliable acquisition of knowledge, in contrast to the obscurity of traditional metaphysics and orthodox religious beliefs, which science had disproved or displaced.

The Enlightenment was tainted by the violent excesses of the French Revolution, which many popular counterrevolutionary writers such as Edmund Burke and Augustin Barruel blamed on the steady corrosion of social and political order under the critical gaze of Enlightenment reason in the decades before 1789. The Enlightenment has continued to attract criticism ever since, from all points of the ideological compass, including reactionary dévots such as Joseph de Maistre, feminists such as Sandra Harding, conservative romantics such as the poet Novalis, twentieth-century neo-Marxists such as Theodor Adorno, and liberals such as Isaiah Berlin. Many of the values, practices, and institutions of our present civilization are rooted in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, so it is not surprising that its legacy continues to be hotly debated today. Many writers such as Michel Foucault have linked the Enlightenment to totalitarianism, a claim that has been strenuously disputed by its contemporary defenders such as the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. A typical recent example of the latter is Tzvetan Todorov’s In Defence of the Enlightenment (2009).

Bibliography:

d’Alembert, Jean. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot. Translated by Richard Schwab. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963.
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by Ernest Mossner. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985.
Hyland, Paul, Olga Gomez, and Francesca Greensides, eds. The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader. London: Routledge, 2003.
Kant, Immanuel. “What Is Enlightenment?” In Kant: Political Writings, edited by H. S. Reiss, translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Outram, Dorinda. The Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Porter, Roy, and Mikulás Teich, eds. The Enlightenment in National Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Schmidt, James, ed. What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Philosophical Dictionary. Translated by Theodore Besterman. London: Penguin, 1972.