Elightenment

The Philosophes

During the eighteenth century, ideas of reform started in France and spread through Europe. This period is referred to as The Age of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment carried the idea that economic change and political reform were possible. People started to think that they could use their own intellect to challenge the intellectual authority of tradition and the Christian past. The people who wrote for change and reform were called the philosophes. They wrote hoping to bring reform to religion, political thought, society, government, and the economy. Thanks to the print culture, the philosophes' ideas were spread throughout Europe. People started to have educated conversations about these new ideas in places like coffeehouses and drinking spots. The ideas of philosophes during the Enlightenment challenged whole societies. Some of philosophes include Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire.

In the mid eighteenth century, the Encyclopedia was published. It was written under the leadership of Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert. Over one hundred French thinkers contributed to the Encyclopedia, including all of the major French philosophes. Diderot wrote on about every subject including philosophy, science, music, and art. D'Alembert divided and described the different sciences, and he analyzed the role of reason. The Encyclopedia was meant to secularize learning and to refute intellectual assumptions from the Middle Ages. It contained articles on religion, government, and philosophy. It attempted to see the natural world through science and technology, and human passions through an understanding of how individuals and societies work. The Encyclopedia helped spread the thoughts of the Enlightenment over the continent.

Immanuel Kant was an important German philosopher who coined the term the "Enlightenment." He said, "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance" (Kant). His greatest works were The Critique of Pure Reason, and The Critique of Practical Reason. "He sought to accept the rationalism of the Enlightenment and still to preserve a belief in human freedom, immortality, and the existence of God" (Kagan, 687). Kant did not think that the human mind just reflects the world around it, but instead uses sensory experience to generate categories. He believed that human beings have a sense of moral duty or an awareness of categorical imperative. Categorical imperative would be the inner command to act in every situations as everyone else would.

Adam Smith wrote on economies. He was one of the most influential philosophers, and his ideas lead to capitalism. He believed that "economic liberty was the foundation of a natural economic system" (Kagan, 603) He is usually regarded as the founder of laissez-faire economic thought and policy.

In his masterpiece, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, he attempts to explain how a nation's collective wealth grows. Smith identifies characteristics of a growing economy. Some of Smith's ideas were that division of labor increases production, monopolies and regulations stifle productive labor, and that there is an infinite store of resources. Smith thought that selfish economic interests of individuals would maximize the economic well being of society. Smith also believed that social and economic development had four stages. The four stages of human society are hunting and gathering, pastoral or herding, agriculture, and commercial. He believed that you could use the four-stage theory to understand what social and economic development a group of people was in. This made the Europeans thinks they were in the highest level of human achievement (Kagan, 604).

Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, was a great political philosopher. He wrote on various forms of government and what causes made them what they were and advanced or constrained their development. He thought that one ideal form of government would be divided into three different branches: executive, legislative, and judicial. Each branch could check and balance the power of the other. The theory of separation of powers had an enormous impact on political theory and on the United States constitution.

Montesquieu's great work, the Spirit of Laws, tried to explain human laws and social institutions. He thought that there was not just one single set of political laws that could be applied to everybody. Laws should be adapted "to the people for whom they are framedÐ'..., to the nature and principle of each governmentÐ'..., to the climate of each country, to the quality of its soil, to its situation and extent, to the principal occupation of the natives" (Montesquieu). He thought that a good government was one that let it's law abiding citizen alone to live their lives, and he thought that in no way should government be lightly tampered with. Montesquieu ideas had a lasting effect on constitutional forms of democracies.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the leading philosophers of the Enlightenment. He was a strange genius that went against the theories of other philosophers. He even changes his views a lot, and contradicted earlier views. He questioned the "concepts of material and intellectual progress and the morality of a society in which commerce and industry were regarded as the most important human activities" (Kagan, 606). Rousseau thought that society is more important than its individual members because individuals are dependent on other people.

Rousseau's The Social Contract