History

Enlightenment Ideologies

Enlightenment ideologies were a set of philosophical and intellectual ideas that emerged in Europe during the 18th century. They emphasized reason, individualism, and the rights of the individual. Key concepts included the belief in progress, the importance of education, and the promotion of freedom and equality. These ideologies had a profound impact on politics, society, and culture, influencing movements such as the American and French Revolutions.

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10 Key excerpts on "Enlightenment Ideologies"

  • The Handy Philosophy Answer Book
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    The Handy Philosophy Answer Book

    What was Enlightenment philosophy?

    Enlightenment philosophy was written during the time associated with the Enlightenment, which occurred roughly around the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment was an historical period in which the ideas of philosophers played dominant cultural roles, in contrast to the importance of religion during the medieval period, or the importance of science and technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

    What was the Enlightenment?

    The Enlightenment was known to its contemporaries and future generations as The Age of Reason. The Enlightenment went beyond intellectual activity to affect painting, literature, architecture, religion, the sciences, and, of course, politics, culminating in the American Revolution (1775–1783) and the French Revolution (1789–1799). While there were common Enlightenment intellectual themes, conditions in different nations produced distinctive types of thought. Also, there was a marked development of ideas from the first half of the 1700s to the second half, principally because of the major social and political changes preceding and accompanying the American and French Revolutions.

    What were the common themes of the Enlightenment?

    The common themes were a set of values that included the following:
    1. Imbuing all other values was the importance of reason and its uses to discover ideal forms of human nature and society.
    2. The belief in the natural goodness of man, which was to be rediscovered by the reform of corrupt institutions.
    3. An overall secularity and downplaying of traditional Christian transcendence.
    4. A new aesthetic and ethics based on the goodness of nature.
    5. Perhaps most important, a great faith in progress or the belief that the present is better than the past and that the future will be better than the present.
    Nevertheless, none of the paramount Enlightenment thinkers simply played out these themes in direct ways. They almost all used reason or rational thought—together with a fair amount of wit—to propound and develop their ideas. The ideas themselves, though, sometimes had unforeseen consequences. That is, often the Enlightenment geniuses went too far, or were not able to fully think things through. As a result, skepticism, pessimism, and romantic madness took over when the ideas of progress and the ideals of human reason ran out.
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  • The Emergence of Modern Europe
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    The Emergence of Modern Europe

    c. 1500 to 1788

    CHAPTER 6 T HE E NLIGHTENMENT T he Enlightenment was both a movement and a state of mind. The term represents a phase in the intellectual history of Europe, but it also serves to define programs of reform in which influential literati, inspired by a common faith in the possibility of a better world, outlined specific targets for criticism and proposals for action. The special significance of the Enlightenment lies in its combination of principle and pragmatism. Consequently, it still engenders controversy about its character and achievements. Two main questions and, relating to each, two schools of thought can be identified. Was the Enlightenment the preserve of an elite, centred on Paris, or a broad current of opinion that the French intellectuals known as the philosophes, to some extent, represented and led? Was it primarily a French movement, having therefore a degree of coherence, or an international phenomenon, having as many facets as there were countries affected? Although most modern interpreters incline to the latter view in both cases, there is still a case for the French emphasis, given the genius of a number of the philosophes and their associates. Unlike other terms applied by historians to describe a phenomenon that they see more clearly than could contemporaries, it was used and cherished by those who believed in the power of mind to liberate and improve
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  • The Enlightenment
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    The Enlightenment

    A Beginner's Guide

    6
    Political theory and the road to revolution
    It will already be clear from chapter five why Enlightened philosophers soon found themselves in the political sphere. Theories of substance, mind and knowledge would be dragged into the seminal debates of the age, out of which most of our modern ideologies emerged. In this chapter, we will look in particular at the political sphere, beginning with the major debates and moving on to the ways in which theory informed politics, until history’s first great ideological conflicts broke out. In a sense, the innovation of the Enlightenment was to provide enough theory and ideology to make ideological conflict possible.
    In this respect the Enlightenment was shaped by the theological disputes of the previous century in two ways. First, the intellectual competition spurred concentration on education, argument and the development of young minds. Secondly, more importantly, the religious wars that followed led to weariness with bloodshed, and the growth of tolerance as an ideal.1 Hobbes argued that bloodshed was a function of a lack of authority and prescribed a strong central government to keep the peace, but he had remarkably little sense that people within a nation, whether sovereign or subject, might have competing interests that needed to be balanced. Enlightenment philosophers were more subtle.
    Liberalism
    The cradle of the Enlightenment’s dominant political philosophy was the commercial hub of Northern Europe, in particular England and Holland, and in many respects early Enlightenment liberalism was a codification of already existing social attitudes which evolved out of a tolerant kind of Protestantism. Trading nations flourish or collapse depending on how many goods and services they can produce and sell, irrespective of the colour or creed of the purchasers. Furthermore, trade is more successful in stable, predictable conditions when people can make investment and purchasing decisions with reasonable confidence. Religious wars, civil wars and persecutions were inimical to trade. The early liberals opposed the wars of religion, partly on humanitarian grounds, partly because of their pointless destructiveness.
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  • A History of Western Thought
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    A History of Western Thought

    From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century

    • Nils Gilje, Gunnar Skirbekk(Authors)
    • 2017(Publication Date)
    • Routledge
      (Publisher)
    Under Louis XIV (1638–1715), the absolute monarchy was firmly established in France: the national assembly was dissolved; the noblemen were, to a great degree, reduced to civil servants and courtiers of the king; and the government became centralized. But Louis XIV finally was overtaken by political difficulties at the end of his reign, and in the wake of this, political debate developed. Political discussion in France was awakened as people reacted against the government’s mismanagement. They criticized absolutism for not being sufficiently effective and rational. But these critics did not demand another form of government. They wanted a more enlightened and effective absolute monarchy. At that time, France did not have viable institutions dating from before the absolute monarchy that could ‘sustain the criticism’. It was thus difficult to attain moderation and to make the government more effective with the help of relatively representative institutions, like the British parliament. A change had to come in the form of a political upheaval. This upheaval came in 1789 with the French Revolution.
    The French did not only lack political institutions. The tradition of political theory had been largely severed. As a result, the French, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, imported British ideas on a grand scale. The ideals were Locke and Newton – the new liberalism and the new science. The French thinkers of the Enlightenment took the British form of government as their model. The French intelligentsia were Anglophiles (‘admirers of the English’). Voltaire visited Britain in the 1720s, and Montesquieu came in the 1730s.
    The Enlightenment in the eighteenth century was thus connected with social changes and with scientific progress: important scientific societies, like the Royal Society in Britain, were established already by the middle of the seventeenth century. Simultaneously, scientific journals and other publications promoting enlightenment appeared. Large collections of works on all aspects of the knowledge of the day were published (such as the French Encyclopédie ). There was a corresponding modernization of universities throughout the eighteenth century, especially the German universities at the end of this period.1 There was a renewal of academic development in the universities, where, among other subjects, the humanistic disciplines were developing most markedly (cf. Ch. 16 ). By the end of the century, a new intellectual era had emerged. As the twentieth century approached, the scientization of society set in with increasing strength – not only in business and administration, but also in ideas and attitudes. In spite of the many and always changing opposing forces, the programme of the Enlightenment continued to move forward.
    The political debate in France during the eighteenth century had its source in the literary salons of the urban middle class. In this elegant setting politics, philosophy, and literature easily mingled. This debate, perhaps, did not lead to much that was new and original. It was largely a matter of old ideas being applied to new contexts. But when old ideas are thus applied, they often acquire a different implication. Here, too, British political thought, which at this time was rather conservative in Britain itself, functioned as a critique of society under the absolute monarchy of France. Thus, the idea of a natural law that was above the king, and that ascribed certain inviolable rights to the individual, served stability and social conservatism in Britain. But in the context of French absolutism, this idea functioned as a critique of the regime. And while it was meaningful to talk about such rights in Britain – because they existed there – the idea of such rights became abstract, speculative, and removed from reality in the French setting. The French imported Locke’s concept of human rights without having the practical political experience of the British. The notion of human rights was simultaneously radical, an attack on the absolute monarchy, and speculative, without a concrete political anchoring. The French version of the British ideas was often bitter and critical – not marked by the British mixture of down-to-earth conservatism and common sense reformism.
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  • Enlightenment against Empire
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    Enlightenment against Empire

    One
    Introduction: Enlightenment Political Thought and the Age of Empire
    IN THE late eighteenth century, a number of prominent European political thinkers attacked imperialism, not only defending non-European peoples against the injustices of European imperial rule, as some earlier modern thinkers had done, but also challenging the idea that Europeans had any right to subjugate, colonize, and ‘civilize’ the rest of the world. This book is a study of this historically anomalous and understudied episode of political thinking. It is an era unique in the history of modern political thought: strikingly, virtually every prominent and influential European thinker in the three hundred years before the eighteenth century and nearly the full century after it were either agnostic toward or enthusiastically in favour of imperialism. In the context of the many philosophical and political questions raised by the emerging relationships between the European and non-European worlds, Enlightenment anti-imperialist thinkers crafted nuanced and intriguingly counter-intuitive arguments about human nature, cultural diversity, cross-cultural moral judgements, and political obligations. This study aims both to pluralize our understanding of the philosophical era known as ‘the Enlightenment’ and to explore a set of arguments and intellectual dispositions that reorient contemporary assumptions about the relationship between human unity and human diversity.
    Throughout this book, I use the term ‘Enlightenment’ as a temporal adjective; in this sense of the term, Enlightenment political theory simply refers to the political thought of the long eighteenth century (that is, the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries). As I argue in the concluding chapter, more substantive and conventional understandings of ‘the Enlightenment’ usually occlude more than they illuminate the writings about non-European peoples and empire by eighteenth-century political thinkers. This study, then, is neither a defence of ‘the’ Enlightenment nor an attack upon it, for an investigation of the anti-imperialist strand of eighteenth-century writings is meant to broaden our understanding of Enlightenment-era perspectives, rather than to redescribe ‘the’ Enlightenment or an overriding ‘Enlightenment project’ that ostensibly typified this age of philosophical thought. As with other historiographic terms of convenience, ‘the Enlightenment’ groups together an extraordinarily diverse set of authors, texts, arguments, opinions, dispositions, assumptions, institutions, and practices. Thus, I begin this book with the presumption that we should diversify our understanding of Enlightenment thought.1
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  • Events That Formed the Modern World
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    Events That Formed the Modern World

    From the European Renaissance through the War on Terror [5 volumes]

    • Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling, Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling, Frank W. Thackeray, John E. Findling(Authors)
    • 2012(Publication Date)
    • ABC-CLIO
      (Publisher)
    The critics of the French Revolution were at first disadvantaged by the success of the first French republic; however, the overthrow of the liberal government and its replacement with the so-called Reign of Terror brought about a reversal in their fortunes. Now the critics could claim that the revolution was, in fact, an anti-Enlightenment event. Proponents of the more moderate Enlightenment program who supported monarchy, even the political regime known as enlightened despotism, and a limited franchise of landowning and merchant elites could disavow the political radicals who claimed to share their vision of a rational and ordered world. The radicals themselves disagreed about the course of the revolution: it was difficult to justify as rational and logical the slaughter of thousands in the Terror and the pan-European conquests of Napoleon. Although both sides of the debate over the French Revolution could claim Enlightenment antecedents for their ideas, neither could claim that its position was entirely consistent with mainstream Enlightenment ideology. In the end, political leaders at the Congress of Vienna decided on pragmatic solutions to their political conflicts; dedication to philosophical ideals was not conducive to success in practical politics, although those solutions were couched in the language of reason and moderation.
    Ultimately, the impact of the Enlightenment on the eighteenth century can be seen best in the resistance of some important intellectuals to its most significant elements, the emphasis on reason and rationality, the championing of the individual over the collective, and the optimistic belief in human progress as coming about through scientific and technological advancement. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the resistance to Enlightenment precepts coalesced in Romanticism, a countermovement that deliberately and consciously rejected anything that smacked of “enlightened” rationality. The Romantics championed emotion over reason, rejected the idea of universal and immutable laws, and embraced the vision of the uncultivated natural world as better representing the glory of God than did human civilization and advanced science and technology. Beginning with Rousseau and Herder, and continuing with the developers of German Romanticism such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller and the early-nineteenth-century English poets Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats, some intellectuals turned their backs on the complacency of Enlightenment optimism and returned to the exploration of those elements of human endeavor and the natural world that the Enlightenment had rejected: the glories of Gothic architecture, the emotional impact of medieval romantic literature, and the pristine beauty of the preindustrial countryside. This retreat from rationalism did not occur spontaneously. Rather, it developed directly out of the same seventeenth-century sources the Enlightenment had used: Descartes, Locke, Newton, and so on. The difference was that the Romantics appropriated elements of these systems of thought that the philosophes had rejected, especially those elements that championed mystical experience and oneness with nature and that downplayed the centrality of the human mind in human progress. Just as the Enlightenment could not divorce itself entirely from the philosophies, ideas, and contexts that had preceded it, so, too, did Romanticism incorporate and appropriate what it found relevant from its predecessors.
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  • Knowledge and Social Structure (RLE Social Theory)
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    Knowledge and Social Structure (RLE Social Theory)

    An Introduction to the Classical Argument in the Sociology of Knowledge

    • Peter Hamilton(Author)
    • 2014(Publication Date)
    • Routledge
      (Publisher)
    1 Philosophy and the roots of social science: the Enlightenment DOI: 10.4324/9781315758046-1
    To introduce a primarily analytical essay by reference to a group of thinkers whose significance is to many purely historical—bearing no concrete relationship to modern trends in, or theoretical developments of, the sociology of knowledge—requires some justification. Let me very briefly provide that justification by outlining the aims of this preliminary chapter. First, I want to demonstrate that we should consider the Enlightenment philosophes (I propose to use through-out this essay the term philosophes, without quotation marks, as the most acceptable synonym for the men of the Enlightenment: my reasons are based on Gay’s reason for the same usage) as those who produced the first steps towards a modern social science in general, and to a modern sociology in particular. And second, I would like to show that in producing an elementary sociology they also produced, largely as a result of the critical rationalism which informed and underlay their whole ‘program’ (as Peter Gay has called it,
    1
    ) a theory of ideology which can be regarded quite properly as inaugurating the sociology of knowledge as an integral part of Western social theory.

    I

    The importance of the Enlightenment, both as social movement and period of intense intellectual development, cannot easily be over-stressed, particularly as it effects discussion of sociology and the sociology of knowledge. What the philosophes produced, when their gaze was directed towards scientific analysis of society, was characteristically a sociology of ideas and values. In modern terms they were more interested in the cultural components, than in the structure, of the social system, and such an interest arose out of their efforts to break down moral and political philosophy into secular, non-metaphysical and primarily rational elements. Without doubt what resulted was not always objective: the very spirit of critical rationalism which underlay their world implied a degree of commitment to certain values. But those values, which might be summarized as anthropocentric, were not antithetical to a scientific approach to society and to man’s role as a social being but rather encouraged such an approach. They were, in the main, scientific values. The philosophes were engaged sociologists and anthropologists, but the direction of their engagement led them to unify reason and science into a world view, which when it became systematized, laid the foundations of a science of society. Enlightenment man was committed to progress, change, secularism, humanity and cosmopolitanism, but above all, to freedom and to the rights of the individual to determine his own beliefs and values.
    2
    This ‘recovery of nerve’ which manifested itself in a ‘science of freedom’
    3
    —a practical science with man at its centre, pursued for his good alone and not for the glory of God or gods—is thus the real source of social science, or as they were termed at the time, the ‘moral’ sciences. And this term is in itself significant in that it gives conclusive proof of the destruction of moral philosophy (which had operated since the Middle Ages as a branch of theology): the old concerns of moral philosophy with the ethics of worldly princes, the duties of men to their fellow men and their relationships to their rulers, and the sources of law, justice and the social order could now be considered within a non-religious framework: the advent of a science of man meant that they could be examined rationally and with regard to how things actually existed, rather than to how they should exist. The new science looked not for revealed truth, or a priori
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  • Out of Our Minds
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    Out of Our Minds

    A History of What We Think and How We Think It

    • Felipe Fernández-Armesto(Author)
    • 2019(Publication Date)
    • S&S India
      (Publisher)
    13
    Like Strabo’s, Gibbon’s belief in common European culture was inseparable from a conviction of European superiority, ‘distinguished above the rest of mankind’. The re-emergence of the idea of Europe was fraught with menace for the rest of the world. Yet the overseas empires founded or extended from Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries proved fragile; their moral records were not good enough to sustain the notion of European superiority. In the first half of the twentieth century, the idea of a single Europe dissolved in wars and subsided in the fissures of ideological quakes. It became commonplace to acknowledge the fact that ‘Europe’ is an elastic term, a mental construction that corresponds to no objective geographical reality and has no natural frontiers. Europe, said Paul Valéry, was merely ‘a promontory of Asia’. The form in which the idea was revived in the European Union movement of the late twentieth century would have been unrecognizable to Gibbon: its unifying principles were democracy and a free internal market, but its member states’ choice of how to define Europe and whom to exclude from its benefits remained as self-interested as ever.14
    THE ENLIGHTENMENT : THE WORK OF THE PHILOSOPHES
    For understanding the context of new thinking, the Encyclopédie was the key work: the secular bible of the philosophes – as the enlightened intellectuals of France were called – who, for a while, mainly in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, dictated intellectual taste to the rest of Europe’s elite. Seventeen volumes of text and eleven of accompanying plates appeared over a period of twenty years from 1751. By 1779, twenty-five thousand copies had been sold. The number may seem small, but, by way of circulation and detailed report, it was big enough to reach the entire intelligentsia of Europe. Countless spinoff works, abstracts, reviews, and imitations made the Encyclopédie
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  • The Historical Value of Myths
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    The Historical Value of Myths

    • John Karabelas(Author)
    • 2022(Publication Date)
    • Routledge
      (Publisher)
    The Enlightenment is often regarded as universal in its aspirations. At best it was an assumption that a set of values could be extended to those who had either already embraced of were willing to embrace the Enlightened principles. It was a highly eclectic and selective doctrine which excluded much, reluctant as it were to engage genuinely with various past cultures that were deemed to fall short of the Enlightened rationalism, quickly marked as superstitious and irrational. There is, of course, nothing unusual in the Enlightenment's request for compliance, and for abiding by the rules. All cultures are potentially inclusive systems, but they are also defined by what they wish to exclude. The term “community” (often used with regard to culture and often is made to mean something that should be indefinitely extended to include as much as possible) clearly denotes participation based on common values and characteristics. The Enlightenment was no different in this respect. But there are two observations to be made.
    The first is that the Enlightenment's participation is often predicated on the idea of historical progress. In so far as progress favours always the present as the most current and successful version of this process, it is an achievement that comes with all the trappings of a narrow vision. Large areas of past human activities are excluded solely because they occurred in the past and not in the present. This makes any idea of historical cosmopolitanism impossible or very difficult. The idea, that is, to feel at home in the past and enjoy aspects of it. The second is that any idea of universality that the Enlightenment may put forward is severely restricted. Even within the western cultural sphere its appeal was not widespread because its anti religious and secular context, despite the secular advances in the post medieval period, was hardly in tune with the cultural heritage of Europe. The religious sentiment remained strong among a substantial number of European people. There is something to be said about a movement with universal aspirations that at the same time was intent on convincing people that their time honoured religious presuppositions were theoretically invalid and erroneous. Presuppositions which historically, if not also conceptually, had created one of the most stable set of values known, and enjoyed almost universal assent. In fact, a more obvious example of universalism was present in the Middle Ages, when societies seemed to organise themselves in terms of their shared religious faith and their commitment to the divine. This did not merely clarify for them their understanding of their place in the cosmos, alleviating the mysteries of existence, but offered practical guidance and values for their quotidian tasks. This foundation seems to have been stronger than anything the Enlightenment managed to achieve.
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  • Out of Our Minds
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    Out of Our Minds

    What We Think and How We Came to Think It

    13
    Like Strabo’s, Gibbon’s belief in common European culture was inseparable from a conviction of European superiority, ‘distinguished above the rest of mankind’. The re-emergence of the idea of Europe was fraught with menace for the rest of the world. Yet the overseas empires founded or extended from Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries proved fragile; their moral records were not good enough to sustain the notion of European superiority. In the first half of the twentieth century, the idea of a single Europe dissolved in wars and subsided in the fissures of ideological quakes. It became commonplace to acknowledge the fact that ‘Europe’ is an elastic term, a mental construction that corresponds to no objective geographical reality and has no natural frontiers. Europe, said Paul Valéry, was merely ‘a promontory of Asia’. The form in which the idea was revived in the European Union movement of the late twentieth century would have been unrecognizable to Gibbon: its unifying principles were democracy and a free internal market, but its member states’ choice of how to define Europe and whom to exclude from its benefits remained as self-interested as ever.14
    THE
    ENLIGHTENMENT:
    THE
    WORK
    OF THE
    PHILOSOPHES
    For understanding the context of new thinking, the Encyclopédie was the key work: the secular bible of the philosophes – as the enlightened intellectuals of France were called – who, for a while, mainly in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, dictated intellectual taste to the rest of Europe’s elite. Seventeen volumes of text and eleven of accompanying plates appeared over a period of twenty years from 1751. By 1779, twenty-five thousand copies had been sold. The number may seem small, but, by way of circulation and detailed report, it was big enough to reach the entire intelligentsia of Europe. Countless spinoff works, abstracts, reviews, and imitations made the Encyclopédie
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