The Enlightenment is a name given by historians to an intellectual movement that
was predominant in the Western world during the 18th century. Strongly
influenced by the rise of modern science and by the aftermath of the long
religious conflict that followed the Reformation, the thinkers of the
Enlightenment (called philosophers in France) were committed to secular views
based on reason or human understanding only, which they hoped would provide a
basis for beneficial changes affecting every area of life and thought. The more
extreme and radical philosophes--Denis Diderot, Claude Adrien Helvetius, Baron
d'Holbach, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Julien Offroy de La Mettrie
(1709-51)--advocated a philosophical rationalism deriving its methods from
science and natural philosophy that would replace religion as the means of
knowing nature and destiny of humanity; these men were materialists, pantheists,
or atheists. Other enlightened thinkers, such as Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, David
Hume, Jean Le Rond D'alembert, and Immanuel Kant, opposed fanaticism, but were
either agnostic or left room for some kind of religious faith. All of the
philosophes saw themselves as continuing the work of the great 17th century
pioneers--Francis Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Leibnitz, Isaac Newton, and John
Locke--who had developed fruitful methods of rational and empirical inquiry and
had demonstrated the possibility of a world remade by the application of
knowledge for human benefit. The philosophes believed that science could reveal
nature as it truly is and show how it could be controlled and manipulated. This
belief provided an incentive to extend scientific methods into every field of
inquiry, thus laying the groundwork for the development of the modern social
sciences. The enlightened understanding of human nature was one that emphasized
the right to self-expression and human fulfillment, the right to think freely
and express one's views publicly without censorship or fear of repression.
Voltaire admired the freedom he found in England and fostered the spread of
English ideas on the Continent. He and his followers opposed the intolerance of
the established Christian churches of their day, as well as the European
governments that controlled and suppressed dissenting opinions. For example, the
social disease which Pangloss caught from Paquette was traced to a "very
learned Franciscan" and later to a Jesuit. Also, Candide reminisces that
his passion for Cunegonde first developed at a Mass. More conservative
enlightened thinkers, concerned primarily with efficiency and administrative
order, favored the "enlightened despotism" of such monarchs as Emperor
Joseph II, Frederick II of Prussia, and Catherine II of Russia. Enlightened
political thought expressed demands for equality and justice and for the legal
changes needed to realize these goals. Set forth by Baron de Montesquieu, the
changes were more boldly urged by the contributors to the great Encyclopedie
edited in Paris by Diderot between 1747 and 1772, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Cesare Beccaria, and finally by Jeremy Bentham, whose utilitarianism was the
culmination of a long debate on happiness and the means of achieving it. The
political writers of the Enlightenment built on and extended the rationalistic,
republican, and natural-law theories that had been evolved in the previous
century as the bases of law, social peace, and just order. As they did so, they
also elaborated novel doctrines of popular sovereignty that the 19th century
would transform into a kind of nationalism that contradicted the individualistic
outlook of the philosophes. Among those who were important in this development
were historians such as Voltaire, Hume, William Robertson, Edward Gibbon, and
Giambattista Vico. Their work showed that although all peoples shared a common
human nature, each nation and every age also had distinctive characteristics
that made it unique. These paradoxes were explored by early romantics such as
Johann Georg Hamman and Johann Gottfried von Herder. Everywhere the
Enlightenment produced restless men impatient for change but frustrated by
popular ignorance and official repression. This gave the enlightened literati an
interest in popular education. They promoted educational ventures and sought in
witty, amusing, and even titillating ways to educate and awaken their
contemporaries. The stories of Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle or Benjamin
Franklin, the widely imitated essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, and
many dictionaries, handbooks, and encyclopedias produced by the enlightened were
written to popularize, simplify, and promote a more reasonable view of life
among the people of their time. The Enlightenment came to an end in western
Europe after the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era
(1789-1815) revealed the costs of its political program and the lack of
commitment in those whose rhetoric was often more liberal than their actions.
Nationalism undercut its cosmopolitan values and assumptions about human nature,
and the romantics attacked its belief that clear intelligible answers could be
found to every question asked by people who sought to be free and happy. The
skepticism of the philosophes was swept away in the religious revival of the
1790s and early 1800s, and the cultural leadership of the landed aristocracy and
professional men who had supported the Enlightenment was eroded by the growth of
a new wealthy educated class of businessmen, products of the industrial
revolution. Only in North and South America, where industry came later and
revolution had not led to reaction, did the Enlightenment linger into the 19th
century. Its lasting heritage has been its contribution to the literature of
human freedom and some institutions in which its values have been embodied.
Included in the latter are many facets of modern government, education, and
philanthropy.