EUROPE DURING THE ENLIGHTENMENT

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

● Human reason would prevail over the accumulated superstitions and traditions of the past
● Confidence that Enlightenment thinkers placed in the powers of human reason stemmed from the
accomplishments of the scientific revolution
● David Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739–40, and the Enquiries Concerning Human
Understanding, 1748)
○ Study of morality, the mind, and government, often drawing analogies to scientific laws
○ Criticized the “passion for hypotheses and systems” that dominated earlier philosophical
thinking → Experience and careful observation usually did not support the premises on
which those systems rested
● Immanuel Kant (1784 essay “What Is Enlightenment?”)
○ Declaration of intellectual independence
○ Enlightenment, in this view, was an escape from humanity’s “self-imposed immaturity”
and a long overdue break with humanity’s self-imposed parental figure, the Catholic
Church
○ Coming of age meant the “determination and courage to think without the guidance of
someone else” as an individual
○ Reason required autonomy, and freedom from tradition.
● Enlightenment thinkers drew heavily on Locke’s studies of human knowledge (Essay concerning
Human Understanding, 1690)
○ Theories of how humans acquire knowledge gave education and environment a critical
role in shaping human character
○ Building on Locke → education became central to their project because education
promised that social progress could be achieved through individual moral improvement
● Sought nothing less than the organization of all knowledge

THE WORLD OF PHILOSOPHES

VOLTAIRE
● Voltaire’s themes were religious and political liberty, and his weapons were comparisons
● His admiration for British culture and politics became a stinging critique of France (“Letters on
the English Nation”, 1734)
○ Of all Britain’s reputed virtues, religious toleration loomed largest of all
● Of all forms of intolerance, Voltaire opposed religious bigotry most, and with real passion he
denounced religious fraud, faith in miracles, and superstition
● Sought to rescue morality, which he believed to come from God, from dogma— elaborate ritual,
dietary laws, formulaic prayers—and from a powerful Church bureaucracy
● Argued for common sense and simplicity, persuaded that these would bring out the goodness in
humanity and establish stable authority
● Regularly exiled from France and other countries, his books banned and burned
MONTESQUIEU
● Relatively cautious jurist
○ One satirical novel (The Persian Letters, 1721)
■ Inspired other authors to use the formula of a foreign observer to criticize
contemporary French society
● The Spirit of Laws (1748)
○ Asked about the structures that shaped law
○ How had different environments, histories, and religious traditions combined to create
such a variety of governmental institutions?
○ What were the different forms of government: what spirit characterized each, and what
were their respective virtues and shortcomings?
○ Suggested three forms of government: republics, monarchies, and despotisms
○ Idealization of “checks and balances” had a formative influence on Enlightenment
political theorists and helped to guide the authors of the U.S. Constitution in 1787

DIDEROT AND THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

● Encyclopedia claimed to summarize all the most advanced contemporary philosophical,
scientific, and technical knowledge, making it available to any reader
● Helped by the mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783) and other leading men of
letters, including Voltaire and Montesquieu

MAJOR THEMES OF ENLIGHTENMENT THOUGHT

LAW AND PUNISHMENT

● Beliefs about education and the perfectibility of human society led many thinkers to question the
harsh treatment of criminals by European courts
● Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794) (On Crimes and Punishments, 1764)
○ Criticized the use of arbitrary power and attacked the prevalent view that punishments
should represent society’s vengeance on the criminal
○ Most European countries by around 1800 abolished torture, branding, whipping, and
mutilation and reserved the death penalty for capital crimes

HUMANITARIANISM AND RELIGIOUS TOLERENCE

● Enlightenment thinkers spoke almost as one on the need to end religious warfare and the
persecution of heretics and religious minorities
● Distinguished between religious belief, which they accepted, and the Church as an institution and
as dogma, which they rebelled against
GOVERNMENT, ADMINISTRATION, AND THE ECONOMY
● Promised to make nations stronger, more efficient, and more prosperous
● Scottish economist Adam Smith (1723– 1790) Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth
of Nations, 1776)
○ Central issues were the productivity of labor and how labor was used in different sectors
of the economy
○ Individuals should pursue their own interests by buying and selling goods and labor
freely on the open market without interference from state-chartered monopolies or legal
restraints
○ Spelled out, in more technical and historical detail, the different stages of economic
development, how the invisible hand actually worked, and the beneficial aspects of
competition

EMPIRE AND ENLIGHTENMENT

SLAVERY AND THE ATLANTIC WORLD

● Control of the slave trade became fundamental to great power politics in Europe during this
period
● Nearly all Enlightenment thinkers condemned slavery in the ​metaphorical sense
● Environmental determinism—the belief that environment shaped character—provided a common
way of postponing the entire issue
○ Slavery corrupted its victims, destroyed their natural virtue, and crushed their natural love
of liberty → enslaved people, by this logic, were not ready for freedom

EXPLORATION AND THE PACIFIC WORLD

● Systematically mapping new sections of the Pacific was among the crucial developments of the
age and had tremendous impact on the public imagination
● The British captain James Cook (1728–1779), who followed Bougainville, made two trips into
the South Pacific (1768–1771 and 1772–1775)
○ Artists and scientists who accompanied Cook and Bougainville vastly expanded the
boundaries of European botany, zoology, and geology

THE IMPACT OF SCIENTIFC MISSIONS

● Enlightenment thinkers drew freely on reports of scientific missions
● Enlightenment thinkers found it impossible to see other people as anything other than primitive
versions of Europeans
● All people were seen to be part of a shared humanity, with cultures and beliefs that reflected their
own experiences
 THE RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT

THE WORLD OF ROUSSEAU

● The Social Contract
○ In the state of nature all men had been equal
○ Social inequality, anchored in private property, profoundly corrupted “the social
contract,” or the formation of government
○ Under conditions of inequality, governments and laws represented only the rich and
privileged, they became instruments of repression and enslavement
○ Freedom did not mean the absence of restraint, it meant that equal citizens obeyed laws
they had made themselves
○ Argument about legitimate authority has three parts
■ Sovereignty belonged to the people alone
■ Exercising sovereignty transformed the nation
■ The national community would be united by what Rousseau called the “general
will”
● Disagreed with other philosophes’ emphasis on reason, insisting instead that “the first impulses of
nature are always right”
● Argued that women should have very a different education
○ Women were to be useful socially as mothers and wives
● Novels became part of a larger cult of sensibilité (“feeling”) in middle-class and aristocratic
circles
○ emphasis on spontaneous expressions of feeling, and a belief that sentiment was an
expression of authentic humanity
● More closely related to the concerns of nineteenth-century romanticism

THE WORLD OF WOLLSTONECRAFT

● Rousseau’s sharpest critic
● Argued more forcefully than any other Enlightenment thinker that
○ (1) Women had the same innate capacity for reason and self-government as men
○ (2) Virtue should mean the same thing for men and women
○ (3) Relations between the sexes should be based on equality
● Applied the radical Enlightenment critique of monarchy and inequality to the family
● Mary Wollstonecraft and Jean-Jacques Rousseau shared a radical opposition to despotism and
slavery
 THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CULTURE

THE BOOK TRADE

● Bound up in a much larger expansion of printing and print culture
● Governments did little to check this revolutionary transformation
○ Russian, Prussian, and Austrian censors tolerated much less dissent, but those
governments also sought to stimulate publishing and, to a certain degree, permitted public
discussion

HIGH CULTURE, NEW ELITES, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

● Produced in networks of readers and new forms of sociability and discussion
● Popular discussions of Enlightenment themes developed in the coffeehouses and taverns of
European cities, where printed material might be read aloud, allowing even illiterate people to
have access to the news and debates of the day
○ Permissive atmosphere of frequent discussion among people of different social positions
led to the development of a new idea: “public opinion”
● Prominent role of women distinguished the ​salons​ from the ​academies and universities
○ Salons brought together men and women of letters with members of the aristocracy for
conversation, debate, drink, and food

MIDDLE CLASS CULTURE AND READING

● Lower on the social scale, shopkeepers, small merchants, lawyers, and professionals read more
and more different kinds of books
● Middle-class families would buy and borrow books to read casually, pass on, and discuss
● Middle-class women were among the fastest-growing groups of readers in the eighteenth century
● Rise of a middle-class reading public, much of it female, helps account for the soaring popularity
and production of novels, especially in Britain

POPULAR CULTURE: URBAN AND RURAL

● Literacy rates varied dramatically by gender, social class, and region
○ Generally higher in northern than in southern and eastern Europe
○ Literacy ran highest in cities and towns
● In the absence of primary schooling, most Europeans were self-taught
● Popular culture did not exist in isolation
● A yawning chasm separated peasants from the world of the high Enlightenment