The Enlightenment (The age of reason)
mid-to-late 1700’s
Ideals
Important figures
Progress= faith in science
Liberty=individual freedoms
Reason = Logical thinking
Goodness=Man by nature is good
Individuality=One person can make a difference
What does "enlightenment" mean?
Higher understading of a particular idea
How did the enlightenment star?
The Enlightenment grew out of the turmoil of
Europe following the rise of the absolute monarchs
People were questioning long-held truths
"divine right”
Religion
Science
Personal freedoms
John Locke
Thomas Hobbes
BOOK = LEVIATHAN (1651)
People by nature are selfish & wicked
Needs a strong ruler to keep order
"Social Contract" People give up some rights for order
Book = Two Treatises of Government (1690)
People learn best through experience /
improvement.
People are born with certain rights.
“natural rights”
Isaac Newton
the physical world and everything in it was like a giant machine
(the Newtonian world-machine).
Mary Wollstonecraft
(1759–1797) English writer
developed her
ideas on education and women’s rights
“Make women rational creatures, and free citizens,and they will quickly become good wives; that is—if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers!”
She died shortly after the birth of their daughter—Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley—who wrote the famous novel Frankenstein.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Unlike many Enlightenment thinkers, Rousseau believed that emotions, as well as reason, were important to human development. He sought a balance between heart and mind, between emotions and reason.
Book : A Vindication of the Rights of Women
The growth of reading : great importance to the
Enlightenment was the spread of its ideas to the literate elite of European society. Especially noticeable in the eighteenth century was the growth of both publishing and the reading public.
Books had previously been aimed at small groups of the educated elite. Now, many books were directed at the new reading public of the middle classes, which included women and urban artisans
Henry Fielding
His novels were about people without morals who survive by their wits. Fielding’s best-known work is The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, which describes the adventures of a young scoundrel.