AP History Chapter 9: The Age of Enlightenment: Eighteenth Century

Thought
I.

The Enlightenment
1. The Emergence of the Enlightenment
o The overriding idea of the Enlightenment was that natural science and
reason could explain all aspects of life.
o The scientific method can explain the laws of nature.
o Progress is possible if the laws are understood and followed.
2. The Philosophes and the Public
o Many writers made Enlightenment thought accessible to a wide range of
people.
o Fontenelle stressed the idea of progress.
o Skeptics such as Bayle believed that nothing could be known beyond all
doubt.
o Locke stressed that all ideas are derived from experience.
o The French philosophes were committed to the fundamental reform of
society.
o Montesquieus theory of the separation of powers was fundamental.
o Voltaire challenged traditional Catholic theology.
3. The Enlightenment Outside of France
o Historians have identified distinctive Enlightenment movements in
eighteenth-century Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Poland, Hungary, and
Russia.
o Different areas followed different strands of Enlightenment thinking.
o David Hume (17111776) was the most important figure in the Scottish
Enlightenment.
4. Urban Culture and the Public Sphere
o The European market for books grew dramatically in the eighteenth
century.
o Popular titles addressed a wide range of subjects.
o The illegal book trade included titles denouncing high political figures.
o The nature of reading changed.
o Conversation and debate also played a critical role in the Enlightenment,
with Parisian salons setting the example.
o Elite women exerted considerable influence on salon culture and on artistic
taste in general.
o The new public sphere celebrated open debate informed by critical reason.
5. Late Enlightenment
o After 1770, a number of thinkers and writers began to attack the
Enlightenments faith in reason, progress, and moderation.
o Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17121778) was devoted to individual freedom,
but saw rationalism and civilization as enemies of the individual.
o Rousseau believed in a rigid division of gender roles.
o The Social Contract (1762) made an important contribution to political
theory.
o Immanuel Kant (17241804) argued that serious thinkers should be
granted the freedom to exercise their reason publicly in print.
6. Race and the Enlightenment

o Enlightenment thinkers developed new and highly influential ideas about

racial difference.
o A primary catalyst for new ideas about race was the urge to classify
nature.
o Race began to be used in similar way to species.
o Thinkers such as Hume and Kant helped popularize new ideas about race.
o These ideas did not go unchallenged.
II.
The Enlightenment and Absolutism
I. Frederick the Great of Prussia
o Frederick II built on the accomplishments of his father.
o He fought successfully to defend Prussia from external threats.
o Frederick allowed religious freedom and promoted education and legal
reform.
o He was unwilling to change Prussias social structure and rejected calls for
civil rights for Jews.
II.
Catherine the Great of Russia
o Catherine deposed her husband Peter III and became empress of Russia.
o Catherine imported Western culture to Russia, supported the philosophers,
and introduced limited legal and penal reforms to her adopted country.
o Pugachevs rebellion put an end to Catherines efforts to reform serfdom.
o Under Catherine, Russia continued to expand.
III. The Austrian Habsburgs
o Joseph II (r. 17801790) and Maria Theresa (17401780) introduced
reforms in Austria.
o Maria Theresa introduced measures aimed at limiting the power of the
papacy in her realm, strengthening the central bureaucracy, and
improving the lot of the agricultural population.
o Joseph II pursued reforms aggressively when he came to the throne in
1780.
o His rapid reforms sent Austria into turmoil and after Josephs death, his
brother was forced to repeal his radical edicts.
IV.
Evaluating Enlightened Absolutism
o The leading European monarchs of the later eighteenth century all claimed
that they were acting on the principles of the Enlightenment.
o There is general agreement that such monarchs did spread the cultural
values of the Enlightenment.
o Absolute monarchs believed in change from above and tried to enact
reforms.
o Recent historians have argued that absolutists were primarily interested in
strengthening the state, not in pursuing humanitarian goals for their own
sake.

Age of Enlightenment: Eighteenth Century Thought

The Enlightenment was inspired by the scientific revolution.

I.

Enlightened thinkers and writers challenged traditional intellectual and

ecclesiastical authority in the name of reason.
They believed that human beings could comprehend the operation of physical
nature and mold it to achieve material and moral improvement, economic growth,
and administrative reform.
They advocated agricultural improvement, increased commerce and consumption,
and the application of innovative rational methods to traditional social and
economic practices.
The rationality of the physical universe became a standard against which they
measured and criticized the customs and traditions of society.
In religious matters they generally advocated a policy of toleration that opposed
the claims to exclusive religious privilege made by state-supported established
churches whether Roman Catholic or Protestant.
As the criticisms of Enlightenment writers penetrated every corner of contemporary
society, politics, and religious opinion, the spirit of innovation and improvement
came to characterize modern European society.
Eighteenth-century period of scientific and philosophical innovation in which people
investigated human nature and sought to explain reality through rationalism, the
notion that truth comes only through rational, logical thinking.
This period formed the basis of modern science.
Some of the ideas and outlooks of the Enlightenment had a direct impact on rulers
in central and Eastern Europe.
These rulers, whose policies came to be called enlightened absolutism, sought to
centralize their authority so as to reform their countries.
The enlightened thinkers were called or philosophes.

Formative Influences of the Enlightenment:

The chief factors that fostered the ideas of the Enlightenment and the call for
reform throughout Europe were:
o the Newtonian worldview
Newton's formulation of the law of universal gravitation exemplified the
newly perceived power of the human mind.
Newton had encouraged natural philosophers to approach the study of
nature directly and to avoid metaphysics and supernaturalism.
This emphasis on concrete experience became a key feature of
Enlightenment thought.
o the political stability and commercial prosperity of Great Britain after 1688.
The domestic stability of Great Britain after the Revolution of 1688
furnished a living example of a society in which enlightened reforms
appeared to benefit everyone.
England permitted religious toleration to all except Unitarians and
Roman Catholics, and even they were not actively persecuted.
The authority of the monarchy was limited, and political sovereignty
resided in Parliament.

As reformist observers on the Continent noted, these liberal policies

had produced neither disorder nor instability, but rather economic
prosperity, political stability, and a loyal citizenry.
o the need for administrative and economic reform in France after the wars of
Louis XIV
Many writers of the continental Enlightenment contrasted what they
regarded as the wise, progressive features of English life with the
absence of religious toleration, the extensive literary censorship, the
possibility of arbitrary arrest, the overregulation of the economy, and
the influence of aristocratic military values in their own nations and
most particularly in France.
o the consolidation of what is known as a print culture
The print culture is a culture in which books, journals, newspapers, and
pamphlets had achieved a status of their own.
Prose came to be valued as highly as poetry, and the novel emerged as
a distinct literary genre.
o the increased opportunities for classification and comparison created by
interactions with peoples on other continents
Isaac Newton and John Locke were the major intellectual forerunners of the
Enlightenment.
o As both literacy and publishing increased, their ideas became known to more
and more people.

II.

The Philosophes:

The eighteenth-century writers and critics who forged the new attitudes favorable
to change.
They sought to apply reason and common sense to the institutions and societies of
their day
They were literary figures, economists, or historians.
They sought to apply the rules of reason, criticism, and common sense to nearly all
the major institutions, economic practices, and exclusivist religious policies of the
day.
o The most famous philosophes included Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, d'
Alembert, Rousseau, Hume, Gibbon, Smith, Lessing, and Kant.

A. Philosophes and Patrons:

The most influential of the philosophes was Francois-Marie Arouet, known as
Voltaire.
Voltaire's career was full of disruptions caused by his offenses against the
rulers of France.
He was arrested and twice briefly imprisoned, in comfortable conditions, in
the Bastille, the royal prison-fortress of Paris.
Voltaire went into exile in England and visited its best literary circles,
observed its tolerant intellectual and religious climate, its moderate political
atmosphere, and admired its science and economic prosperity.

III.

After he returned to France, he published Letters on the English. The book

praised for the virtues of the English, especially their religious liberty, and
implicitly criticized the abuses of French society.
He published Elements of the Philosophy of Newton, which more than any
other single book popularized the thought of Isaac Newton across the
continent.
His extremely popular plays, essays, histories, and stories along with his farflung correspondence made him the literary dictator of Europe.
Voltaire wrote the novel Candide, his still widely read satire attacking war,
religious persecution, and what he considered unwarranted optimism about
the human condition.
Voltaire believed human society could and should be improved, but he was
never certain that reform, if achieved, would be permanent.
o THE IDEAS OF the Enlightenment spread through not only books and
journals, but also public conversation. They took on a life of their own in
public discussions in a new popular institution of European social lifethe coffeehouse.
o Throughout Europe, the coffeehouse provided a social arena for the
open, spontaneous discussion of events, politics, literature, and ideasbut only for men (respectable women did not enter coffeehouses).
o One irony, however, should be noted about the eighteenth-century
European coffeehouses. Although they provided one of the chief
locations for the public discussion of the ideas of the Enlightenment,
which fostered greater liberty of thought in Europe, the co e and sugar
consumed in these establishments were cultivated by slave labor on
plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil.
Immanuel Kant admired Frederick the Great
He was born in the capital of Prussia.
Kant spent his entire life in the city.
In 1784, he published an essay answering the question "What is
Enlightenment?" in which he defined enlightenment as "man's emergence
from his self-incurred immaturity."
Through the application of reason, men could earn the right to be considered
fully autonomous adults, no longer dependent on the guidance of church or
state authorities to determine what is right.
Kant credited Frederick the Great for recognizing his subjects' right to
freedom of thought, and most especially freedom of religious ideas.

The Enlightenment and Religion:

Philosophes stated that the ecclesiastical institutions, especially in their frequently
privileged position as official parts of the state, were the chief impediment to
human improvement and happiness.
Almost all varieties of Christianity, especially' Roman Catholicism, as well as
Judaism and Islam, were the targets of their criticism.
Philosophes complained that Christian churches hindered the pursuit of a rational
life and the scientific study of humanity and nature.

o Both Roman Catholic and Protestant clergy taught that humans were basically
depraved, becoming worthy only through divine grace.
The philosophes challenged not only a set of ideas, but also some of Europe's most
powerful institutions.
o Most clergy were legally exempt from taxes and made only annual voluntary
grants to the government.
o Bishops served in the British House of Lords and on the Continent, cardinals
and bishops advised rulers or were sovereign princes themselves.
o In Protestant countries, the leading local landowner usually appointed the
parish clergyman.
o Clergy justified their social and political status quo, and they were active
agents of religious and literary censorship.
A. Deism:
A belief in a rational God who had created the universe but then allowed it to
function without his interference according to the mechanisms of nature and
a belief in rewards and punishments after death for human action.
The philosophes, although critical of many religious institutions and
frequently anticlerical, did not oppose all religion.
The Newtonian worldview had convinced many writers that nature was
rational.
Deists regarded God as a kind of divine watchmaker who had created the
mechanism of nature, set it in motion, and then departed.
The deists' informal creed had two major points.
o The first was a belief in the existence of God, which they thought the
contemplation of nature could empirically justify. Because nature
provided evidence of a rational God, that deity must also favor rational
morality.
o The second point in the deists' creed was a belief in life after death.
Deists hoped that wide acceptance of their faith would end rivalry among the
various Christian sects and with it religious fanaticism, conflict, and
persecution.
There was never a formal or extensive deist movement, but deist ideas
spread informally throughout the culture and provided for some people a
framework for a non-dogmatic religious outlook.

Questions:
1. What were the central concepts of the Enlightenment? To create a new world view of all
aspects of life, science, politics, and society. Also, that methods of natural science

could and should be used to examine and understand all aspects of life. Rationalism is
a good general word to centralize the meaning and concepts of the Enlightenment,.

2. Who were the philosophes and what did they believe? The philosophes were thinkers
who rethought society and politics and presented their ideas to the public. They were
the educated elite of Western Europe and they believed in political ideas such as
separation of powers and also that a good monarch is key to a great government
because human beings are rarely worthy to govern themselves.

3. Describe the interests and actions of Madame du Chatelet and Madame Geoffrin/
Madame du Chatelet was fascinated by the new world system of Isaac Newton and
helped spread his ideas. She also influenced Voltaire, Chatelet was also very interested
in women's rights in politics and society. Geoffrin had interests in saving her enterprise
and also practiced Christianity and did not allow attacks on the church in her house.
4. Define the important terms:
Rationalism- an idea of the Enlightenment that suggested that everything was to
be submitted to the rational, critical, scientific way of thinking.
General will- concept in political philosophy referring to the will of the people as a
whole
Secular- Denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or
spiritual basis
Skepticism- doubt or unbelief with regard to a religion; humanitys best hope was
open minded toleration.
Tabula rasa- a blank tablet on which the environment writes the individuals
understanding and beliefs.
Philosophes- one of historys most influential groups of intellectuals

5. Summarize the following people and terms:

Montesquieu-- member of French nobility saw absolutism of Louis XIV, comes up with
theory
Spirit of the Laws--books
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, divide power
separation of power within government
Estates-General had three branches, goal is to prevent one person from gaining too
much power checks
favored british gov -- three systems, parl monarch courts
supports parlements- power of monarch in check
Rousseau-author of the Social Contract-introduced by hobbes, give up certain rights in order for gov. to rule well
hobbes, too much emphasis on land ownership not focusing on true problem, social
inequity, no need to kill the people if you have land and making money
rousseau argues that we should with the general will
majority rules, democracy
many viewpoints not recognized,
people agreed with you misconstrued
part of enlightenment more accurately founder of romanticism
thinks that mankind needs to go back to simpler time, man lived more harmoniously

with nature
man has only been corrupted by materials of civilisation
looking at early middle ages, no need for international affairs
book known emile talks about importance of education experiential learning and the
importance of education
Diderot, Denise-- represents ultimate work of philosophes, collects all the works of
philosophes and compiles them into one book, the Encyclopedia
Catherine the Great is a patron of him, and
Marquis de Beccariaauthor of On Crimes and Punishment, puts forward on crime and punishment based
on logic
if Locke says we are a sum of experiences, how does putting them in a prison
human treatment of prisoners, punishment of crime should be based on how much
damage was done to society
the only time a government should execute someone is the most heinous, treason.
his views has impact
Fred II bans torture, Catherine puts limits, Joseph II bans capital punishment
application of science rev and rational thought
Women in the Enlightenment
salons-- parisian cafes
women play a great role
women are expected to host a party, can be
Madame de Jeffron
Madamde de Galle

use husbands money to sponsor writers and host big parties

a lot of philosphes support womens equality
bulk of society does not support it
women being inspired by it
Mary Wollstencraft--English writer who inspires women in the French Revolution
late 1700s-- more people advocating ideas,
dHolbach-- human beings operate as machines,
Hume-argues against faith in natural law and faith--only choose one, human ideas
are the result of human sensory experiences
Neoclassicalism--return to Renaissance era, focus on symmetry and balance,
the artwork of the French revolution
Jacques Louis David--Liberty leading the people
architecture also very popular, Arc de Triomphe
Washington D.C built in this time, roman, greek influence