Reference
- ENLIGHTENMENT, THEAlthough somewhat arbitrary, the English (1688) and French (1789) revolutions are frequently used as convenient beginning and ending points for the Enlightenment. Centered primarily in England, Scotland and France, the Enlightenment was a diverse, international movement that soon spread over much of Europe and the American colonies. Enlightenment intellectuals included academics as well as journalists, writers or government officials active in public life. They met together in salons to discuss issues, published articles in newspapers and journals, wrote books and corresponded through letters. Above all, they were concerned to apply reason to problems of the day.
It has been customary to define the Enlightenment in terms of its supposed obsession with reason and universal truths. On this view, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries together comprise the Age of Reason, and René Descartes (1596-1650), with his agenda for a comprehensive system for certain knowledge through rigorous deduction from indubitable premises, is said to epitomize the Enlightenment ideal. But recent scholarship has emphasized the significance of other seventeenth-century thinkers such as G. W. Leibniz (1646-1716), Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and Robert Boyle (1627-1691). In fact, Descartes's early rationalism was largely abandoned by eighteenth-century thinkers in favor of more empiricist approaches stemming from Bacon and Locke. Many Enlightenment thinkers were actually somewhat skeptical about reason. Thus many historians restrict the Age of Reason to the seventeenth century and identify the Enlightenment itself with eighteenth-century intellectual movements.
- Credo Reference This link opens in a new window
Credo Reference is an easy-to-use tool for starting research. Gather background information on your topic from hundreds of full-text encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, quotations, and subject-specific titles, as well as 500,000+ images and audio files and over 1,000 videos.
Primary Sources
- Englightenment: Internet SourcebookAn Internet Sourcebook on the Enlightenment from Fordham University.
- Words of the Enlightenment c. 1750–1900It would be a mistake to think that Enlightenment ideas pointed everyone in the same direction. These primary sources show how widely new notions of liberty were interpreted.
Streaming Media
- The Enlightenment Quest for Reasonable FaithOn the heels of the Scientific Revolution, the "Enlightenment," as Professor Worthen explains, was not one single movement but rather a constellation of ideas and philosophers who debated the relationship between faith and reason. Explore the theories and worldviews of Diderot, Voltaire, Locke, and other Enlightenment thinkers.
- Enlightenment SkepticismConsider just how dangerous Gibbon's sociological treatment of Christianity in Chapters 14 and 15 (while grounding the faith in extremely detailed historical analysis) seemed to most of his readers. Rather than focusing on divine providence, the Decline and Fall documents the human causes behind Christianity's evolution into the dominant ideology of the ancient world.
Perspectives
The Enlightenment
Debate over the meaning of 'Enlightenment' began in the eighteenth century and has continued unabated until our own times. This period saw the emergence of arguments on the nature of man, truth, the place of God, and the international circulation of ideas, people and gold. In the second edition of her book, Dorinda Outram studies the Enlightenment as a global phenomenon, comparing it against the period's broader social changes. The new edition also features a new introduction and chapter on slavery, and the bibliography and short biographies have been extended.
Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Europe
The eighteenth century was a unique period of global and fundamental change. Britain conquered India and much of America, the American Revolution produced the USA, and Russia expanded vastly. In the field of ideas the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century was consolidated and followed by the Enlightenment. Nationalism flourished, populations surged and the Commercial and Industrial Revolutions with Western technology eclipsed the East. Few centuries have inspired such a galaxy of historians, and their groundbreaking work has been drawn upon by Derek Beales in his collection of articles and special lectures. He covers the whole European kaleidoscope but especially Joseph II and the Habsburg monarchy, and sees Enlightened Despotism as the embodiment of the century's revolution in ideas, policies, government and administration.
The Religious Enlightenment
In intellectual and political culture today, the Enlightenment is routinely celebrated as the starting point of modernity and secular rationalism, or demonized as the source of a godless liberalism in conflict with religious faith. In The Religious Enlightenment, David Sorkin alters our understanding by showing that the Enlightenment, at its heart, was religious in nature. Sorkin examines the lives and ideas of influential Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic theologians of the Enlightenment, such as William Warburton in England, Moses Mendelssohn in Prussia, and Adrien Lamourette in France, among others. He demonstrates that, in the century before the French Revolution, the major religions of Europe gave rise to movements of renewal and reform that championed such hallmark Enlightenment ideas as reasonableness and natural religion, toleration and natural law. Calvinist enlightened orthodoxy, Jewish Haskalah, and reform Catholicism, to name but three such movements, were influential participants in the eighteenth century's burgeoning public sphere and promoted a new ideal of church-state relations. Sorkin shows how they pioneered a religious Enlightenment that embraced the new science of Copernicus and Newton and the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, and Christian Wolff, uniting reason and revelation to renew faith and piety. This book reveals how Enlightenment theologians refashioned belief as a solution to the dogmatism and intolerance of previous centuries. Read it and you will never view the Enlightenment the same way.
The Pragmatist Turn
In The Pragmatist Turn, renowned scholar of American literature and thought Giles Gunn offers a new critical history of the way seventeenth-century religion and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment influenced the formation of subsequent American writing. This shaping was dependent on their pragmatic refiguration less as systems of belief and thought than as frames of reflection and structures of feeling, what he calls spiritual imaginaries.Drawing on a large number of figures from earlier periods and examining how they influenced generations of writers from the nineteenth century into the early twenty-first --including Henry Adams, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, William James, Henry James, Kenneth Burke, and Toni Morrison--Gunn reveals how the idea or symbolic imaginary of "America" itself was drastically altered in the process. As only a seasoned scholar can, Gunn here presents the history of American religion and literature in broad strokes necessary to reveal the seismic philosophical shifts that helped form the American canon.
John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture
John Marshall offers an extensive study of late seventeenth-century practices of religious intolerance and toleration in England, Ireland, France, Piedmont and the Netherlands and of the arguments which John Locke and his associates made in defence of 'universal religious toleration'. He analyzes early modern and early Enlightenment discussions of toleration; debates over toleration for Jews and Muslims as well as for Christians; the limits of toleration for the intolerant, atheists, 'libertines' and 'sodomites'; and the complex relationships between intolerance and resistance theories including Locke's own Treatises.