The Enlightenment

- the enlightenment was essentially a set of attitudes and a view of the world which became widespread and very influential. The Enlightenment period in European history covered the late 17th C up to the end of the 18th C or up to the early stage of the Fr. Revolution. Enlightenment ideas and outlook did not completely displace older, preexisting notions or outlooks, but they did become very influential in western, northern Europe especially.

- however, keep in mind that great periods of intellectual thought usually are incubating for long periods of time, partly because cosmologies do not change quickly or easily; views of the world and philosophies are usually inter-related with and reinforced by religion and religious sanctions; this tends to slow the pace of change.

1. it owed a great deal to the Renaissance and the recovery and revival of Classical learning; this tradition emphasised human reason and rationality as a path to knowledge and as a way of life. It focused upon deductive logic and reasoning; there was a new emphasis upon being human and upon developing and honouring both the human mind and the human body. (Much of earlier Christianity had tried to strive to be less human and more saint like or like the angels!)
   
   
2. it was also rooted in the beginnings of the scientific revolution—Isaac Newton’s defining of the Law of Gravity and the ability to express certain regularities in the universe in mathematical formulations was a great stimulus.
   
   
   

• a passive source because they prevented humans from seeing and understanding the truth and, therefore, from being able to act upon correct knowledge; people did not know and therefore could not do ‘good’.
  
  
• but ignorance and superstition were also active sources of evil; under their influence, people acted irrationally and committed many crimes and horrors; they did this individually, but they also did this collectively in bad laws and practices (burning of witches, use of torture as part of the ‘justice’ system, horrible forms of execution, among many others).
  
  

• the miraculous was increasingly seen as being not only a product of ignorance, but also, as being illogical and irrational.
  
  
• if God as the Great Clockmaker had imagined and created this marvellous universe incorporating all the rationality of the laws and principles upon which it operated, why would He constantly intervene and disrupt his own laws and principles with miracles? It didn’t make sense. Would God cause the sun to stand still (i.e., cause the earth to stop rotating) as claimed in the Book of Joshua? Especially, would He do this just to allow the Israelites several more hours to slaughter the Canaanites?
  
  
• it did not seem likely then that God made many interventions as miracles; nevertheless, some still believed that God did actively try to encourage humans to become better and more rational. However, this was ‘natural’ and not ‘supernatural’. Thus, they did not necessarily believe that God was completely impersonal, but they did believe that He would deal with humans only in a rational way and that seemed to largely or completely exclude the supernatural.
  
  
• others, however, believed that God had embodied rationality in the universe and then left human beings more or less on their own to discover and apply this for themselves; this was known as Deism.
  
  
• if God were rational, would He not want humans—his creations—also to be rational? It followed, therefore, that God wanted and intended humans to be rational and to develop their intellect. Thus, learning and the acquisition of knowledge could be regarded not only as good things in themselves, but also as something that God expected of humans.
  
  
• the Enlightenment also could result in a different view of humans; if humans were made in the image of God, then they were rational or at least were capable of reason and rationality.
  
  
• the purpose of human societies, therefore, was to nourish, to develop and to preserve this rational potential and capacity in humans.
  
  

• a changed conception of God;
  
• a changed conception of humans and human nature;
  
• a changed conception of human societies and their purposes.
  
  

• we already noted some aspects of the effects on religion and conceptions of God. Some people declared that all religion was superstition, but even those who did not go that far, nevertheless, often did agree that there was a great deal of ignorance and superstition mixed in.
  
  
• we noted the tendency to regard the miraculous as irrational and unlikely; so too, many began to downplay the mysterious and emotional, arguing that reason should be applied here too. Emotion and ecstasy (what was often called ‘enthusiasm’) could lead people astray. Reason was a more reliable guide.
  
  
• some began to take a relative position in religion, as in other things; yes, one Creator or Clockmaker but different people in different backgrounds called Him different names and had different conceptions; who was to say that one was better or more ‘true’ than the others?
  
  

• ferocious, arbitrary laws;
  
• uneven and unequal application of laws and taxation;
  
• lack of education for the majority (how could their reasoning faculties be developed without education?);
  
• ability and political power were too frequently not in the same individuals—fools ruled and governed while wise people were ignored and not used.
  
  

• 1st, society and institutions should be examined and studied systematically and logically; the objective should be to discover the natural laws and principles which govern social relationships. These laws should be applied and allowed to operate in society.
  
  - this was the basic premise underlying the idea of the ‘social science’; Adam Smith, in his book The Wealth of Nations, was the father of economics and political science (in the 19th C, these studies were known as ‘political economy’); others were examining people and institutions which were a preview of anthropology and sociology.
  
  
• 2ndly, results of these inquiries should be implemented in a systematic way; the results would be checked and further reforms made if necessary—reform should be on-going.
  
  
  1. investigate/examine;
     
  2. use findings to suggest reforms;
     
  3. implement reforms;
     
  4. monitor and investigate;
     
     

• Frederick had the greatest reputation both for himself (as a musician, philosopher and soldier) and for the fame of the many thinkers, philosophers, musicians and artists who gathered at his court.
  
  - however, his Prussian society was very militarised and his army depended upon the land-owning aristocrats both for officers and as the major source of wealth to pay for a relatively large army; as well, he had a couple of large and expensive wars during his reign.
  
  - thus, while tax and legal systems were streamlined and an efficient bureaucracy put in place, no fundamental social or political reforms were made; the privileges and dominance of the large landowners (the Junkers) were maintained.
  
  
• Joseph II was probably the most sincere and most determined; he did attempt social and legal reforms.
  
  - he made genuine attempts to improve the lot of the common people. However, in the end, most of his reforms were frustrated; the landowning aristocrats and the bureaucrats used their existing powers and the dependency of the monarchy on their military and administrative services to frustrate most reform.
  
  - the fact was that the Hapsburg monarchy was German in an empire where the majority of population were Slavic peoples or Magyars; the monarchy relied almost entirely upon the aristocratic minority (many, but not all, of whom were German) to maintain itself; the Hapsburgs had little ability to appeal to the general population and people (the way French monarchs could appeal to French people or English monarchs to English people); the monarchy could not push conflict with the landowning classes too far or it would undermine its own existence.
  
  - Joseph is said to have died of a broken heart; he died relatively young.
  
  
• Catherine the Great was concerned to make the regime and the military stronger ( she brought many soldiers and even sailors—e.g. the American captain and admiral, John Paul Jones—to Russia).
  
  - although she had great autocratic powers, she was a foreigner (a German) and depended upon supporters in the military who were also primarily derived from the landowning classes.
  
  - in comparison with so many of the other Russian monarchs of the century, Catherine stands out as less vicious, less incompetent and certainly less mad; however, she did not really effect much reform which improved the lot of the mass of the population.
  
  

• liberalism of all kinds and socialism had their roots in and grew out of the Enlightenment.
  
• conservatism was to a considerable extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and some of its ideas.
  
  

• Wesleyan Methodism rejected Deism and an unemotional religion in favour of highly emotional conversion experiences; there were movements in Catholicism (Jansenism, the Oxford Movement in Anglo-Catholicism) which also accepted mysticism and greater roles for emotion. Protestant fundamentalism of the late 19th and 20th Cs is also very much against the ideas of reason and science that were incorporated into Protestant Christianity in the 18th & 19th Cs.
  
  
• nationalism, racism and romanticism were all movements which rejected the emphasis upon reason and placed much more emphasis upon emotion and non-rational elements.
  
  
• in the late 19th & early 20th Cs., there were widespread revolts against reason and the belief in a rational universe; some thinkers (Nietzsche, Freud and others whom we shall discuss in the 2nd term) argued that humans were basically irrational and that life and the universe were ultimately meaningless. Nazism was only one extreme example of this new irrationality that was explicitly or at least implicitly a rejection of the Enlightenment.
  
  

The Social Contract

- as we noted, this theory originated in the Enlightenment; John Locke is often associated with its development, but in fact a number of writers were involved.

- it is still significant because it is the basic idea underlying our conception of representative ‘democracy’.

- it is an explanation (probably a ‘myth’) of the origins of ‘authority’ and consequently of all political and judicial institutions (including governments) in society.

1. to govern and to adjudicate,
   
2. to pass laws and rules to regulate behaviour,
   
3. to enforce the laws.
   
   

1. to abide by a set of common rules and
   
2. to empower rulers and officials to enforce the rules.
   
   ** authority is based upon and derived from the population who, in effect, surrender and transfer some of their inherent rights of self-protection in return for much bigger and stronger protection than they could muster on their own. Authority derives or comes from the bottom of society upwards.
   
   

1. Marx argued that in the ‘Communist Society’ (the ultimate goal and end of human organisation and society), “the state would wither away”. Thus, anarchy was Marx's idea of heaven.
   
   - thus, some anarchists found Marx's theories congenial and could incorporate them into their anarchist notions. However, other Marxists, notably Lenin, went in the other direction and in fact built strict notions and lines of authority into the Bolshevik (renamed ‘Communist’) Party itself. This is an important issue when we examine the creation of the Soviet Union, supposedly built on Marxist principles.
   
   
2. Anarchists were relatively few in numbers but several times they had big effects:
   
   - anarchists carried out several key assassinations and attempted assassinations and created an enormous amount of fear, especially in the ruling classes of Europe in the late 19th and early 20th Cs. They created much more fear than their numbers ever warranted.
   
   -anarchists were a critical and disruptive element in the Spanish Civil War.