Enlightenment

Also known as the 'Age of Reason,' the Enlightenment was both a state of mind and a philosophical movement (with different streams within it) which gripped the imagination and hearts of Europeans and North American during the late-17th and early-18th Cent, that took, first and foremost, reason as the guiding key to all truths. From there derived all its other major principles, which included the belief that nature is ordered by physical and natural laws, the individual rights to liberty and prosperity, and the perfectability and inevitability of progress in and of society. The American and French Revolutions were both inspired by, but also marked the turning point of, the Enlightenment, when its failure to live up to all its promise gave way to Romanticism.

The history of the Enlightenment may be traced through three main phases:

1. "Early Enlightenment," from later half of the 17th to early 18th Cent., when the foundational ideas of the movement were laid down by thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Renee Descartes, and naturalists like Galileo, Kepler, Leibniz, and Isaac Newton. Together they argued that established the 'laws' that human nature is mutable, that reason and science, if not alone then mainly, should be the way to discovering the truth. Revelation (i.e., the authority of the Church) and tradition (the authority of monarchs) were, therefore, to be held suspect and/or rejected. This is best summed up in Immanuel Kant's motto, "Dare to Know! Have courage to use your own reason!"

2. "High Enlightenment," occupying the middle-half of the 18th Cent., when learning and the celebration of reason reached a feverish pitch. In France this period saw the publication of the first encyclopedia by Diderot (1751-77). Almost no realm of life is not open and subject to analysis and explanation. Most significantly, politics began to be reshaped by Enlightenment thinking as political reformers such as Frederick the Great of Prussia set about moderning his estate along rationalistic lines, French political philosophers like Montesquieu and Rosseau, and American revolutionaries like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson drafted the "Declaration of Independece" and justified the American colonies' fight for independence within similar frames. Increasingly the movement also became more and more anti-clerical.

3. "Late Enlightenment" arrived with the French Revolution beginning 1789, when the vision of remaking the nation along the lines of Enlightenment rationalism gripped the nation. The terror that accompanised the revolution, however, also showed up the cracks and bankruptcy of the philosophy, and pointed to its demise, and eventual replacement by Romanticism.