THE ENLIGHTENTMENT

The period can be described in 5 words:

          Reason, nature, progress, happiness, liberty

Causes

Thirty Years’ War.

1618 to 1648

German writers critize nationalism and war

Scientific study

Exploration of the world

Pre-Enlightenment Discoveries

Johannes Kepler

Galileo Galilei

René Descartes

Francis Bacon    

The development of testable hypotheses

The Enlightenment in England

Thomas Hobbes,

Leviathan (1651)

Hobbes advocated a single intimidating ruler

John Locke

Locke advocated a representative government—Two Treatises of Government (1690).

Glorious Revolution 1688, English Protestants overthrow the Catholic king James II and

installed the Protestant monarchs William and Mary. In the aftermath of this, the English government ratified a new Bill of Rights that granted more personal freedoms.

          Sir Isaac Newton

The Enlightenment in France

Baron de Montesquieu

Develops concepts such as the separation of power by means of divisions in government.

Voltaire

social and political change by means of satire and criticism

Denis Diderot

          Encyclopédie thirty-five volumes

Romanticism

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

 The Social Contract (1762), a work championing a form of government based on small,

direct democracy that directly reflects the will of the population.

Romantic era that would be defined by an emphasis on emotion and instinct instead of reason.

Skepticism

Denied the ability of rational thought to reveal universal truths. Their philosophies revolved around the idea that the perceived world is relative to the beholder and, as such, no one can be sure whether any truths actually exist.

Immanuel Kant

David Hume

The End of the Enlightenment

French Revolution.