The Enlightenment and Philosophers

Introduction

In nineteenth-century Great Britain, the life expectancy of a rural farmer was 38 years. Farmers and their families lived in small houses. Sometimes they shared these houses with the farm animals. The oldest son would inherit the land, and the girls would hope to marry young men who owned land. If the summer was dry, the crops would not grow. It would not be possible to feed the family.

Often, as a result of the hardships experienced, small children became very sick and died. Infant mortality rates were around 22 percent. The government, which was an absolute monarchy, was not interested in the welfare of the people.

Think of what it was like for people in the nineteenth century. Do you think they could have imagined a world in which they could decide where they would live, who they would live with, or what kind of job they would have? Or, would people have felt that, no matter how hard they worked, they could never get wealthier or live a better life than their ancestors?

Liberalism led to the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. During these periods, beliefs and values changed. Religion was no longer seen as the source of knowledge. Instead, people started to believe that everyone (or at least those who owned land) could think and reason. This changed people’s ideas on how society should be governed.

The Origins of Liberal Thought

European politics, philosophy, science, and communication were changed during the Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment. During these 150 years, Enlightenment thinkers in Britain, France, and Europe questioned traditional authority and embraced the idea that humanity could be improved through rational change. The Enlightenment produced numerous books, essays, inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars, and revolutions. The American and French Revolutions were directly inspired by Enlightenment ideals and marked the peak of its influence and the beginning of its decline.

The French Revolution of 1789 was based on the vision of the Enlightenment of throwing out the old authorities to remake society but it devolved into bloody terror that showed the limits of its ideas and led, a decade later, to the rise of Napoleon.

During this period, people sat around and talked and asked questions, and gave ‘suggestions’ for solutions to the problems in society. People ran experiments and tested and came up with theories.

The Big Thinkers

Many of the revolutionary political ideas of the Enlightenment developed out of a basic disagreement on how people should be governed. This disagreement is best illustrated by the divergent views of British political thinkers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes but included many others that we will also explore this semester.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was concerned with the problem of social and political order: how human beings could live together in peace and avoid the danger and fear of civil conflict. Although Hobbes’s solution to the state of nature where life is “nasty, brutish, and short” seems to suggest that the individual citizen has no worth and that only the central authority, or Leviathan, matters, a closer reading of his work suggests otherwise. Because of Hobbes’s experience with the horrors of civil war, he saw humans as inherently selfish. This selfishness, if left unchecked, would result in chaos and harm to everyone. By having all people give up their sovereignty and by handing power over to a protecting ruler, the Leviathan, everyone would be secure. Hobbes’s goal, then, was the security of all individuals, which could be achieved only at the expense of their sovereignty.

John Locke (1632–1704) was a contemporary of Hobbes. Locke deeply opposed the authoritarianism of the Church and the state believing that individuals had the right to use their reason and logic to make their own decisions. He said, “Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything.”

Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) was an Enlightenment thinker in France. Montesquieu believed in the individual's worth, the equality of individuals, and the accountability of government. Montesquieu’s satiric writings so angered the Catholic Church that they banned his works. If you remember, under the theory of the divine right of kings, monarchs had come to believe they were no longer bound by any earthly authority, since their status was determined by God. The Church and the monarchy were the two great authoritarian powers, and society was divided into three classes or estates: clergy, aristocracy, and commoners. In the 1700s, pressures for change began to mount against the French regime for change. Montesquieu believed strongly in the separation of powers—that is, that the government should be divided into three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial. Under this system, the three branches should be both separate from and dependent on one another so that the influence of any one power would not be able to exceed that of the other two.

For this system to work, the people needed to be involved in the government—that is, it needed to be a democracy. Montesquieu believed that each citizen had to participate in and be aware of the laws and the workings of government.

Summary

In this lesson, you learned how in the past, individuals lived in societies with limited individual rights and freedoms. Liberal-minded people demanded that individual rights and freedoms be created and written into law.  

The ideas of Enlightenment philosophers prepared people for liberal ideologies. This earlier form of liberalism was known as classical liberalism. Classical liberalism has evolved into a modern form of liberalism that ensures political freedom and protects economic individualism.