Sushantika Chakravortty

3rd year, B.A Programme

HISTORY ASSIGNMENT
CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE II
(c. 1500-1800)
Question- What do you understand by the term
“Enlightenment”? Discuss its main ideas.
Answer- Debate over the meaning of “Enlightenment” began in the nineteenth
century itself and continued unabated until our own times. Even in the eighteenth
century, contemporaries were well aware that the spread of words used in
different linguistic areas to refer to ‘Enlightenment’- Aufklärung in German,
Lumières in French, Illuminismo in Italian- betrayed a fundamental diversity at
the heart of ‘the Enlightenment’.
The Enlightenment was not a coherent of body of ideas but was broadly a
collection of philosophical views in vogue among the intellectuals during the
eighteenth century. Originating from classical times and the Renaissance, these
ideas were developed by scientific thinkers and philosophers like René Descartes,
John Locke, Isaac Newton and many others. The Enlightenment can be -roughly
divided into three stages. The first covers the first half of the eighteenth century
and most directly reflects the influence of the Scientific Revolution; the second,
the “high Enlightenment,” begins with the publication of The Spirit of Laws (1748)
by Charles Louis de Montesquieu and ends in 1778 with the deaths of Francis-
Marie Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and the third, the late
Enlightenment, influenced by Rousseau’s work, marks a shift from an emphasis
on human reason to a greater preoccupation with the emotions and passions of
mankind.
Like all intellectual and cultural movements, the Enlightenment did not emerge
spontaneously. The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century paved the
way for the Enlightenment movement in Europe. Historians of science originally
used this term to mean the advances that began with Copernicus and continued
with Galileo, Kepler and Descartes, before reaching their culmination with
Newton. Sir Isaac Newton, emphasized that science—reason and experimentation
—holds the key to understanding nature, and that mankind discovers knowledge
not through religious teaching but through “observation, analysis, and
experiment.” The Enlightenment thinkers concluded that everything is determined
by the environment.
ENLIGHTENED IDEAS
The definition of the Enlightenment remains difficult. The famous German
philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote an article in 1783, “What is Enlightenment?”
Since then there have been diverse assessments on its origins, its philosophy, its
politics and ethics and its legacy as well as is relationship with modernity. Kant
calls “Enlightenment”, in a much-quoted phrase, ‘man’s release from his self-
incurred immaturity’, by the use of his own reason, undistorted by prejudice and
without the guidance of others. Enlightenment was a desire for human affairs to
be guided by rationality rather than by faith, superstition, or revelation; a belief in
the power of human reason to change society and liberate the individual from the
restraints of custom or arbitrary authority; all backed up by a world view
increasingly validated by science rather than by religion or tradition. A landmark in
this approach to the Enlightenment was Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of the
Enlightenment, wherein the Enlightenment was ‘a value-system rooted in
rationality’. This line of interpretation of the Enlightenment saw it as an
intellectual movement by great thinkers in Western Europe and displayed little
interest in its social or political context.
The Enlightenment ideas were further developed in France during the eighteenth
century. There was a sudden outpouring of highly critical literature and ideas of
governance. This became the new philosophy of the Enlightenment. For the
secularization of political thought, the empirical method was adopted. The
philosophes espoused views of nature, mankind, society, government, and the
intrinsic value of freedom that challenged some of the most fundamental tenets
Europeans had held for centuries. The implications of Enlightenment thought
were revolutionary, because the philosophes argued that progress had been
constrained by social and political institutions that did not reflect humanity’s
natural goodness and capacity for material and moral improvement. The
Enlightenment thinkers considered church to be the most privileged and wealthy
body enjoying unlimited power thus they challenged the doctrinal authority of the
established churches and launched a crusade for the secularization of political
institutions.
Enlightenment in France was accompanied by several intellectual trends. Some
French intellectuals formed a group and called themselves “Physiocrats”. It
included a number of luminaries such as Turgot, Quesnay and Dupontde
Nemours.  They believed in an all-embracing society based on natural order to
protect the right of self-preservation. Another group consisted of scholars called
“encyclopaedists”, led by Diderot. He strongly believed in the spread of
knowledge and for that purpose he worked hard to prepare encyclopedias based
on classification of knowledge.
Peter Gay defines the programme of Enlightenment as one of hostility to religion
and as the search for ‘freedom’ and ‘progress’ achieved by a critical use of reason
to change man’s relation with himself and society. The Rise of Modern Paganism
and The Science of Freedom, clearly indicates Gay’s agenda in interpreting the
Enlightenment.
The most direct attack on the great problem of knowledge was launched by John
Locke (1632–1704) in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke
postulated that each individual is a tabula rasa or blank slate, at birth. Believing
that all knowledge is sensory, Locke denied the existence of inherited abilities and
rejected the idea that humanity is stained by original sin, a view held by the
Catholic Church. He anticipated that the discovery of more laws of nature would
be the basis of secular laws on which society should be based. He was confident
that humanity might thereby be able to improve social conditions. The question
of collective action leads to seventeenth-century political theory and another of
Locke’s works, Two Treatises on Government. Locke’s views on government must
be viewed within the context of his time and the concepts of “natural right” and
“natural law.” Man, as a rational animal has the ability to use reason to
understand the natural law that is integral to the structure of the world. He
concluded that humans are born with certain rights that individuals on their own
are unable to protect. Therefore, they enter into a social contract creating a
government charged with the responsibility of protecting such fundamental rights
as life, liberty, and property. For Locke, full participation in the social contract and
exercise of rights was limited to those possessing wealth and status. Although his
examinations of the analogy between family and government led him to view
marriage as a form of social contract, he rejected the equality of women in
everyday life.
From these antecedents stemmed belief in reason, natural law, and progress.
They brought with them the assumption that human reason was capable of
discovering the natural laws that governed existence and that structuring a
society in accordance with these laws would ensure unending progress. A
mechanical interpretation of the universe, along with skepticism and optimism,
served to challenge established authority.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth century, a Republic of Letters was formed
by as self- proclaimed community of scholars and literary figures. They
communicated their ideas in letters, unpublished manuscripts, books, pamphlets,
brochures, and through writing novels, poetry, drama, literary and art criticism,
and political philosophy. The philosophes glorified the collegiality and
interdependence of writers within the “republic of letters,” what the men and
women of the Enlightenment sometimes called the informal international
community of philosophes.
The eighteenth-century intellectuals to whom the spread of Enlightenment ideas
is attributed were the French philosophes. Important philosophers of the
Enlightenment included Montesquieu, Condillac, Voltaire and Rousseau. There
were many other popular intellectual figures- Jean d’ Alembert, the
mathematician, Marquis de Condorcet, a political figure during the French
Revolution, statesmen Jacques Turgot and the social scientist and philosopher
Claude Adrien Helvetius and Baron d’Holbach. Their goal was to pursue the
implications of the knowledge that emerged through sense perception and
reflection rather than continually to accept the dictates of established authority.
They focused on issues related to economics, justice, education, religion, and
politics. As a result, policies and institutions were scrutinized in the confidence
that natural laws could be discovered and used to implement constructive
reforms. These thinkers also stressed the role of an independent judiciary and
well- publicized law. They spoke against torture, capital punishment and favored
public trials, equality before law, prevention rather than punishment.
Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher and political commentator widened the
scope of Enlightenment by including social practice and spheres. In his Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), he sees the emergence of a ‘public
sphere’ during the eighteenth century. He argues that the Enlightenment had
seen the creation of a ‘public realm’ for the discussion and transformation of
opinions: what we would now call ‘public opinion’. Habermas’ ‘public realm’ is a
space where men could escape from their role as subjects, and gain autonomy in
the exercise and exchange of their own opinions and ideas.
Another approach to the Enlightenment is provided by the so- called post-modern
writers such as Jean-Franfois Lyotard, and Michel Foucault. According to
Foucault, the notion of reason under Enlightenment instead of promoting
liberation became an instrument of control - silencing unreason. He neither
supports the movement nor criticizes it but sees it as a shift crucial to the
development of an attitude of modernity. 
Among the chief features of the Enlightenment as a social movement was its
stress on universal laws, thereby rejecting supernaturalism. Without denying the
existence of God, the advocates of the Enlightenment condemned all forms of
religious intolerance. Scientific method was advocated for studying human
activities as well as natural phenomena. It was an attempt to free the human
mind from superstitions. The concept of liberty, citizenship and forms of
government became very popular themes in the writings of Enlightenment
thinkers. The rule of law was seen as an instrument to protect individual citizens
against the possibility of arbitrary excesses by the ruling powers. The laws were to
be in conformity with reason and were to be administered impartially.

THE PHILOSOPHES
The intellectual leadership is clearly evident in the early stages of the eighteenth
century as the prominent figures of Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755),
François Marie Arouet (Voltaire) (1694–1778), and Denis Diderot (1717–1784)
dominated the discourse with a surge of new ideas about society, religion, and
politics. Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat; 1689-1755) published Persian
Letters (1721) his work detailed the political and social injustices of life in the
West. By casting this critique of eighteenth-century France in the form of a
travelogue, Montesquieu was able to dodge royal censorship. Beneath the satire
of the Persian Letters, Montesquieu was arguing the point that nature reveals a
universal standard of justice that applies for all people in all places at all times, in
Islamic Persia as in Christian France. He also offered the first critical examination
of the institution of slavery by a philosophe. He rejected slavery as an extension
of despotism, concluding that “slavery is against natural law, by which all men are
born free and independent” because “the liberty of each citizen is part of public
liberty. “The Spirit of Laws” (1748) inaugurated the high Enlightenment.
Montesquieu applied the principles of observation, experimentation, and
analysis, which lie at the heart of scientific inquiry, to the social and political
foundations of states. He described the relationship between climate, religion,
and tradition, and the historical evolution of a nation’s political life. He believed
that there were three kinds of government - republics, despotisms and
monarchies. He considered the English monarchy as the best example of political
rule and that the English Constitution immensely contributed to political thought
based on the idea of checks and balances and separation of power of executive,
legislature and judiciary.
Voltaire's name has almost become synonymous with the Enlightenment. His first
major published contribution to the Enlightenment was Letters on the English
(1733). The cause of religious tolerance rather than that of political reform
consumed his greatest energies. In early dramas and poems and in Letters on the
English, he had denounced the narrow imposition of belief and the harsh
intolerance of the church. Like many of the philosophes, Voltaire’s religious views
may be regarded as deist. In the Philosophical Dictionary (1764), he subjected
Christian belief and practice to scrutiny, identifying contradictions and absurdities.
Denis Diderot’s (1713-1784) monumental Encyclopedia best reflected the
collaborative nature of the Enlightenment, as well as its wide influence. The
Encyclopedia, on which Diderot worked for twenty-five years and to which he
contributed 5,000 articles, stands as the greatest monument of the
Enlightenment. It consisted of 60,000 articles and 2,885 illustrations in 28
volumes. Subtitled “A Classified Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Trades”, this
first such compilation in the West was a bold attempt to organize and classify all
knowledge gathered from “over the face of the earth.” In this work he
subordinated religion to a minor position. It was questioned and put to reasoning
much to the discomfort of the orthodox and religious man.
 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712– 1778) represents both continuity and change in
Enlightenment thought. His major works reflecting his political beliefs, the
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and the Social Contract, made him a
celebrated thinker. In The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau tried to resolve the
question of how people could join together in society to find protection and
justice and yet remain free individuals. Rousseau imagined a social contract in
which the individual surrenders his or her natural rights to the “general will” in
order to find order and security. By “general will,” Rousseau meant the consensus
of a community of citizens with equal political rights. Another major work of
Rousseau was Emile. It was written as a novel but in fact was a treatise
emphasizing the importance of education to men.
There were a number of other Philosophers found outside France. In Great
Britain, the Scottish moral philosopher Adam Smith (1727–1790) formulated the
classic statement of laissez-faire economics in his Inquiry into the Nature and
Course of the Wealth of Nations. Placing greater significance on commercial and
industrial activities, Smith held that all components of economic endeavor
contributed to progress and growth as long as the role of government was
minimized.
Despite the fact that many women writers published works in the eighteenth
century, such as Mary Astell's Some Reflections on Marriage and Christine
McCauley's eight-volume History of England, the lack of women in
Enlightenment discourse is a reflection of societal limitations rather than ability or
effort. It remained for Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) to make the strongest
argument of the time in Britain for logically extending natural rights and equality
to women. Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women in
which she argues that contemporary distinctions made between men and women
are irrational.
Mention also has to be made of David Hume a famous Scottish philosopher. He
was a great philosopher and like the other thinkers of the Enlightenment, he
adopted the weapon of skepticism. In his Treatise on Human Nature, he made an
attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into a moral subject.
He believed that a careful examination of human experience would promote
knowledge of human nature and that it could be formed into a possible science.
Baron Paul d’Holbach (1723–1789) deemed the origin of all religion and its
primary human motivation to be the human need to avoid pain. In his System of
Nature (1770), he extended his argument to develop a determinism that rejected
all belief systems that were not guided solely by reason, experience, and nature.

CONCLUSION
Enough has now been said to show the great range of variations in ways of
interpreting the Enlightenment. Though the Enlightenment was a movement
primarily related to society it had its impact on political policies as well as on the
structure of government. Almost all the thinkers spoke of natural laws based on
rationalism, humanism and the application of scientific knowledge. It was
believed that knowledge alone is not sufficient and it had to be supplemented by
observations, experimentation and application. Enlightenment thought helped
create a discourse of principled opposition that would shake the foundations of
absolutism. If the philosophes themselves were not revolutionaries, many of their
ideas in the context of eighteenth-century Europe were indeed revolutionary.

BIBLIOGRAPHY-
 Sinha, Arvind. Europe in Transition from Feudalism to Industrialization.
Manohar Publishers & Distributors (2010)
 Outram, Dorinda. The Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press (2013)
 https://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-
and-maps/enlightenment
 Class lecture by Dr. Sabina Kazmi