The Enlightenment: Science and a Changing Social Order

The Enlightenment was an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual movement. As a movement, it represented the mature outgrowth of the humanist movement of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It embodied the application and realization of methods of thought established first in humanism, among them empiricism and deductive reasoning. The Enlightenment, like the humanist movement, drew its impetus from the study of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, mathematics, and literature. In this ancient knowledge, thinkers rediscovered the value of the intelligent, reasoned mind and its powers to perceive and understand the ordered workings of nature.

Scientific strides of the seventeenth century had profound effects. As noted, discoveries in the areas of scientific endeavor, especially astronomy and physics, established a methodology of critical empiricism today known as scientific method. The advances radically modified the contemporary understanding of God by removing the definition from the realm of tradition and superstition and placing it under the cold light of scientific truth.

Eighteenth-century thinkers used the new confidence gained from the scientific discoveries of the seventeenth century to challenge conventional modes of thinking and systems of belief, now perceived as irrational. The challenge they mounted affected all areas of life from the long-held historical and moral questions of Christianity to the organization of government and society. Enlightenment thinkers sought to direct critical rationalism, or reason, not only to science, but also to society, believing that political reform, more efficient forms of government, economic growth, and even a more rational ordering of society could be found and used to benefit all mankind.

Throughout the late eighteenth century and first half of the nineteenth, the winds of change swept Europe. The ideal of the rights of man took center stage over the rights of monarchs, aristocrats, and the Church. Society became a system of social contract that every man entered into, and by which every man benefited. Societal change, however, came by violent means. Stimulated by the American Revolution, the idea of change became a genuine popular movement, and the French Revolution of 1789 swept away the authority of the monarch and the Church and replaced it with a republic that threatened the existence of every monarchy in Europe. The revolution unleashed domestic violence unseen since the religious wars, and by the close of the 1790s, French leaders restored order only by submitting themselves to the rule of Napoleon. His armies realized the worst fears of France's neighbors. For more than a decade, his military campaigns overturned every institution on the continent.

To the mid-nineteenth century the rights of man were not the only impetus to political unrest. Uprisings were carried forward by diverse ideals representing the often conflicting goals of different segments of the society. Industrialists sought rights of unrestricted economic activity. At the same time, the worker sought a legal framework for his rights as a foil against increasing hardships imposed by the Industrial Revolution.

The wars of the revolution and the years of Napoleon's empire building also formulated an awareness of sense of national self. Nationalism, a force defined by common language, culture, and history, has proven to be the most powerful ideology of the modern world with uses to justify wars of aggression and the domination of one nation by another.

Scientific advances led to a tremendous forward surge in manufacturing capabilities, the Industrial Revolution, and to the global dominance of Europe as the exporter of goods, influence, and culture. The Enlightenment expired, in part, as the result of its own violence and by immense problems fostered by the Industrial Revolution. Ironically, the very political ideas, intellectual methodologies, and economic skills that allowed Europe to dominate in the nineteenth century were the same tools that the colonial territories would use in the twentieth century against her.

New Intellectual Directions
The conviction that reform was desirable and possible came into its own only after 1700. As noted, the movement gained its impetus and confidence from the discoveries of the Scientific Revolution and the belief that the rational human mind was almost infinite in its power to affect good. The human mind could understand and order the operations of nature for the good of mankind, and man himself could organize his own societies into beneficial ones in which the rights of each member stood foremost.

The most important philosophes, the intellectual leaders who strove to apply reason and common sense to all quarters of human existence, included Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, Hume, Gibbon, Smith, Betham, Lessing, and Kant. For this loose confederation, spread geographically throughout France and the British Isles, the need for reform embraced the rights of the rational moral citizen to make his own way in the world, without the aid of God. These rights engendered, among others, the freedom from arbitrary power, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to realize one's trade, and the freedom of aesthetic response. The printed word was a primary conduit for Reformation writers in the sixteenth century, and it served the philosophes to the same end. The Enlightenment message was conveyed through books, plays, novels, pamphlets, treatises, encyclopedias, magazines, and newspapers. Most of the philosophe authors sprang from the middle classes; the target of their literary efforts was the same class.

The Enlightenment progressed in several stages. In the first half of the seventeenth century, reform-minded writers sought to use the new scientific discoveries for general attack upon vested interests, political oppression, and religious condemnation. For the enlightened thinker, the future well being of mankind lay in subjugating the power of the earth and its resources to human benefit and living in freedom and peace within societies governed by man's reason. In a common thread, the philosophes viewed Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church, as an immense impediment to utopia, and ferociously attacked the influence of ecclesiastical institutions. The future of mankind did not rest with pleasing God or following divine commandments; man did not require clerical intervention to become worthy creatures. In the second half of the century, writers began to address specific abuses and suggest the changes that should be made.

The Important Philosophes
Francois Marie Arouet (1694-1778), known as Voltaire, was one of the earliest and most influential of the social reformers. His first books, prompted by the tolerant political environment he found in a visit to Great Britain, established Voltaire as an important writer. Letters on the English (1733) praised British society and indirectly criticized that of France. The Elements of the Philosophy of Newton (1738) disseminated and made popular the achievements of Isaac Newton. His subsequent literary efforts were devoted to fierce attacks, each in turn, upon evils he perceived in French and European society and institutions. His output encompassed histories, letters, stories, and plays, the last of which is best exemplified by Candide (1759). His acid satire and sarcasm earned him a premier place in European literature.

Francois Marie Arouet, or Voltaire.
Sculpture by Jean-Antoine Houdon

Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1733) was a member of the aristocracy, a lawyer, a member of provincial parliament, and a scientist who belonged to the Bordeaux Academie des Sciences. His most famous work the Persian Letters (1721) was, at the surface, the correspondence of two Persians visiting Europe with friends at home. Behind the humor of the fictitious letters lay a scathing criticism of the cruelty and irrationality of European institutions and life. In his most significant work, The Spirit of Laws (1748) was likely the most influential book of the period. Based upon his observations of both ancient and modern nations, Montesquieu concluded that there could be no uniform set code of law to govern all peoples of all nations in all places. He purported that there existed different political, geographic and political variables, and that the variables determined the type of government, whether it be a monarchy or democracy or any other type, that would best serve its people.

Like the founding fathers of the United States, Montesquieu concluded that the British government represented the best existing model of government. In his view, a monarchy would best serve France, but a monarchy whose power was limited by other political entities including the aristocracy and town governments. Hence different corporate bodies, with powers that a monarch could not supersede, would effectively represent the different segments of the society. The underlying and most widely influential proposition put forth by Montesquieu was the limitation by separation of the power within any government, as in executive, judicial, and legislative branches, to ensure that each branch is held in its influence in balance with the others. Moreover, the exercise of power should be governed by constitutional by-laws.

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) and Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783) undertook the creation of one of the greatest achievements of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopedia (1751). The Encyclopedia was both a monument to the most advanced knowledge of the day and a collective plea for the right of personal expression. Over a hundred of the most advanced thinkers of the day contributed to the Encyclopedia. The Encyclopedia advanced the most critical ideas in the areas of religion, government, and philosophy. On a more mundane level, it also contained articles relaying the latest advances in manufacturing, canal building, ship construction, and agriculture.

The Encyclopedia sought to secularize learning and to dispel the intellectual assumptions remaining from the Middle Ages and Reformation. The articles on politics, ethics, and society identified problems and proposed changes to the immediate welfare of humanity on the basis of reason. The authors pointedly ignored the obsolete, ineffectual, and self-serving solutions offered by divine law. Instead of drawing models from Medieval Christianity, the encyclopedists held up as examples the theories of government, society, and ethics of antiquity.

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) approached the rapidly changing society in which he lived from a considerably different point of view than his contemporaries. Whereas Rousseau promoted the rights of citizens through democracy or enlightened monarchy and Montesquieu defended their rights through a reformed and revived aristocracy, Rousseau questioned the quality of citizen that the new, economically driven society produced. He argued that the society defined its citizens, and that a society that placed material improvement as a primary achievement could not produce moral citizens but competitors.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, painting by Maurice LaFour

Rousseau drew upon ancient models to define of the ideal relationship of citizen and state. He emphasized that no individual citizen was more important than the state. Since the survival of the state guaranteed the survival of the individual citizen and his freedoms, the first obligation of the citizen was to ensure the continuation of the state. Law was the instrument of freedom and created by general will. Rousseau believed that the general will, since it represented all it constituents, would always be moral and right. Democratic participation in the state served to bind each citizen to it, and his compliance with the laws he helped to create would protect his rights and freedoms.

Rousseau's ideas ran directly counter to the trends to individualism and wealth accumulation ascendant in the highly commercial society of the eighteenth century. Unlike his contemporaries, Rousseau did not believe that the accumulation of wealth at a national level would produce better citizens. He would have preferred citizens of high moral character, even if it meant they remained poor, who created an ideal state through participation in complex and necessary social relationships. Rousseau even went as far as to suggest a common tolerant civic religion as a means to unite the society.

Deism
The proposed common religion, an idea shared and developed by many of the philosophes, was called deism. The basic kernel of the movement was the Newtonian worldview. If nature was rational so must be its creator. The religion used to worship, it followed, should also be rational. Deism embraced a central point, continued belief in the existence of God, deduced from empirical study of the majesty and order found on a profound scale in nature. For deists, God was a "divine watchmaker" who created every atom of the universe and all its interconnections, set the creation in motion, and then withdrew from active participation. Deism, as formulated in the ideal, was empirical, tolerant, reasonable, and capable of promoting reasonable, ethical behavior.

For a short time, one of the post Revolution governments in France experimented with the imposition of deist philosophy. It did not deny the existence of a greater power, but it was crafted to diminish the power of the Catholic Church in France. Had it proved viable, deism would have eliminated religious fanaticism and religious. Foremost among the goals of the philosophes, led by Voltaire, was religious tolerance and in practice, tolerance meant the end of church abuses of the population. Voltaire described as a case in point the situation of a Huguenot, John Calas, executed in 1763 by the Catholic Church. The man was tortured and executed in public, without legal recourse and without confession, for his religious convictions. Voltaire's Treatise on Tolerance (1765) brought the cause of the decedent to the public. Voltaire's tireless efforts prompted a reversal by church authorities concerning Calas' guilt. Without the confession and with the later legal reversal, Calas' execution had no propaganda value. The execution became little more than the arbitrary exercise of power. The enlightened point came into focus: tolerance spelled the subordination of religious values to the consideration of the secular values of human rights.

Economic Theories
By far the most important proponent of the shift in attitudes about economics that accompanied the Enlightenment came in the ideas of Adam Smith (1723-1790). Smith is regarded as the founder of the laissez-faire school of economic policy. In Smith's view, nature supplied boundless resources and opportunities of exploitation for the human enrichment. Smith believed that economic regulation stifled economic development, and to that end he urged the abolition of tariffs, special monopolies, domestic regulations for trade and regulation, and similar legislation. He favored a limited role of government in economic development, preferring instead that markets and manufacturing be linked instead to the initiative of the producer and the demands of the consumer.

Adams did not view, however, all government involvement as suffocating. Smith argued that the government should be responsible for furnishing schools, military forces, and roads. Moreover, he believed that the government should play a significant role in any commercial venture that presented costs too great for the private enterprise to absorb. An example would be the opening of desirable but dangerous trade routes or territories. Smith believed that the world offered boundless resources and that their uninhibited exploitation would furnish the means to the improvement and comfort of mankind.