History

Enlightenment Thinkers

Enlightenment Thinkers were a group of influential philosophers and intellectuals in the 18th century who advocated for reason, individualism, and the rights of the individual. They sought to challenge traditional authority and promote ideas of freedom, democracy, and progress. Key figures of this movement include Voltaire, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant.

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11 Key excerpts on "Enlightenment Thinkers"

  • Education and Philosophy
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    Education and Philosophy

    An Introduction

    The ideas that in their early stage caused John Donne to feel that the world had lost coherence and, in their fuller development prompted the unease of the deeply conservative Swift, were simmering in Donne’s sixteenth century, and no doubt earlier. In the seventeenth century they were carried forward to a fruition that threatened the complete overthrow of traditional thinking. The eighteenth century was to see the culmination of what amounted to a transformation in humanity’s understanding of how knowledge was to be acquired, how and for what purposes that knowledge might be used, and in its apprehension (in more than one sense of that word) of its place within a reordered universe. This was not an intellectual revolution conducted by a few great thinkers, but a process carried forward through fierce debate amongst the educated citizenry of the times. That debate, however, was shaped by the major contributions – philosophical and scientific, but also cultural and political – of many figures. In this chapter and the next we will refer to some of these thinkers but our account of the Enlightenment will be built around an examination of the writings of four philosophers whose ideas are often cited as the most influential in determining the directions and the contours of modern thought – the Frenchman René Descartes, the Englishman John Locke, the Scot David Hume and the German Immanuel Kant.

    René Descartes

    Doubting everything

    Descartes lived from 1596 to 1650, his most important texts being published between 1637 and 1644. A notable characteristic of his thought is its refusal to begin from the ideas of earlier thinkers. His approach was summed up in a later work where he wrote of being ‘obliged to write here as though I were treating a topic which no one before me had ever described’.5
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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 Enlightenment was not a single historical event, and it had a variety of impacts on the intellectual communities of Europe and America throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. The Enlightenment was also not a single unified system of concepts propounded by a coherent body of intellectuals; it included thinkers as diverse as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edward Gibbon, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume. All of these writers could be considered members of the Enlightenment community. They all agreed that the important intellectual issues of their world revolved around the place of reason in the intellectual scheme; the role of human progress in the development of civilization; the centrality of the human individual in the world scheme; and the definition of nature and its relation to God. However, they disagreed fundamentally on the focus, images, and motivations of the community itself and the ideas that seem to have defined it. Some of the most influential thinkers, such as Rousseau and Johann Gottfried von Herder, can be considered in many ways proponents of “anti-Enlightenment” perspectives. In addition, the political revolutions in English America and in France, which made claims to following a program of Enlightenment philosophy in championing the individual and in proclaiming their systems more rational than those that preceded them, were in fact antithetical to mainstream Enlightenment ideas that the philosopher should never be politically involved and that monarchy was an essential component of any political system to maintain public order. Thus, it is difficult to discuss the impact of this “event” in a way that suggests that the impact was universally the same. The best way to approach it is to discuss a number of broad themes—reason, individualism, and progress—that were typically found in Enlightenment writing; to dis cuss the influence of those themes on the political, social, economic, and intellectual developments of the age; and to outline the internal conflicts within the Enlightenment community with respect to these themes.
    The first broad theme is the Enlightenment emphasis on the superiority of reason over emotion. The origins of this idea lie in the seventeenth century rather than the eighteenth, in particular with the thinkers of the Scientific Revolution. Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, René Descartes, and above all, Isaac Newton all contributed to the Enlightenment idea that reason can overcome human fallibility and that humanity can progress (itself a theme that will be discussed in more detail later in this essay) and be perfected through rational inquiry and rational activity. The Enlightenment also embodied a rejection of this idea of the superiority of reason in the work of Rousseau, who emphasized instead the emotional and considered the rationalist arguments to be the product of a decadent civilization. In this, as in so many ways, Rousseau represents a turning away from Enlightenment rationalism toward the dominant cultural phenomenon of the next century, Romanticism.
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  • The Handy Philosophy Answer Book
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    The Handy Philosophy Answer Book

    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.

    What was meant by “reason” during the Enlightenment?

    Reason was considered a universal capacity of all people that was brought to fruition by logic and the knowledge of science. It required people to abandon superstition and oppressive institutions, such as absolute monarchy and doctrinaire religion.

    Is there a sharp distinction between Enlightenment philosophers and other intellectuals?

    No, both Enlightenment philosophers and other intellectuals influenced the ideas of the time. Among philosophers, those who have endured historically as part of the present philosophical canon are limited to George Berkeley, David Hume, Thomas Reid, Jeremy Bentham, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Giambattista Vico. (John Locke is also strongly associated with the Enlightenment, although he dates back to the seventeenth century). However, during their times, brilliant thought in other fields by writers and personalities such as Ethan Allen, Marquis de Condorcet, Denis Diderot, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Baron d’Holbach, Thomas Jefferson, Joseph-Marie de Maistre, Charles Baron du Montesquieu, Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestly, Adam Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Voltaire (François Marie Arouet) were part of the intellectual climate for philosophers, as well.

    Were all eighteenth-century thinkers in agreement with Enlightenment themes?

    No. As a counter-tradition to the general rational spirit of the Enlightenment were the Romantics, such as the writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottfried Herder, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, and William Wordsworth. There were also those, generally referred to as the “pessimists” of the Enlightenment, who did not subscribe to the belief in progress characteristic of the age. For example, in philosophy, Giambattista Vico, Edmund Burke, and Joseph-Marie de Maistre; and in letters, William Cowper, Choderlos de Laxlos, the Marquis de Sade, and Jonathan Swift.
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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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  • 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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  • Europe 1780 - 1830
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    Europe 1780 - 1830

    • Franklin L. Ford(Author)
    • 2014(Publication Date)
    • Routledge
      (Publisher)
    would give meaning to the past and if possible serve as guides to the future. As the present chapter’s title seeks to make clear, we shall pay special attention to three broad intellectual disciplines. To do so is not to insist that only philosophical, scientific and historical endeavours were of interest to Europeans in our period. However, these three, particularly since the first of them included political, social and ethical speculation, offer a structure of sorts to what might otherwise become a formless survey.
    Political Speculation: Enlightenment and Revolution
    Considering the narrative of the period, we should not be surprised at finding political issues, questions of man and the state, looming large among objects of intellectual concern. It is important in this regard not to misinterpret the legacy of the eighteenth century. The pre-1789 Enlightenment had not been rich or, for the most part, highly original in political theory. Montesquieu, to be sure, had espoused the separation of powers, not only among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, but also among different orders of men. Note, however, that his doctrine could survive only in the barest, most narrowly institutional terms in a society which saw the importance of ‘orders’ waning, as that of classes and parties increased. Rousseau had applied the theoretical (and quite old) notion of a social contract to the realization of popular sovereignty, had evoked the almost mystical concept of the General Will and had written movingly of the ethical grounds for reconciling external law with individual freedom; but he had said nothing about the actual bases and forms of modem government that could guide his admirers in action.
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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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  • The Triumph and Tragedy of the Intellectuals
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    The Triumph and Tragedy of the Intellectuals

    Evil, Enlightenment, and Death

    • Harry Redner(Author)
    • 2017(Publication Date)
    • Routledge
      (Publisher)
    Among the most vigorously debated of the pre-Socratics before 1750 was Xenophon of Colophon (570-478 BC)... the Enlightenment turned him into one of the most important precursors of the esprit philosophique of the eighteenth century. 2 There might be something to be said for likening intellectuals to such early “philosophers,” from which it does not follow that they were at all like later philosophers. The early intellectuals were philosophes in the French sense and not philosophers. The difference is subtle, though crucial in establishing the uniqueness and unprecedented nature of intellectuals. Philosophers are those thinkers who follow in the main lines of the age-old tradition of Western metaphysics, its critics as well as its exponents. They are those engaged with the abstract ideas, such as Being, Reality, Reason, Mind, Time and Space, Logic and Mathematics, epistemology or the nature of scientific knowledge, and so on; or, alternatively, those who set themselves to dismantling such ideas, the antimetaphysical philosophers. At present such people, or at least their successors, are almost always academic professionals. Previously this was not always the case. The leading philosophers of the seventeenth century, the precursors of’the philosophes, men such as Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Locke were not academics. In Germany during the eighteenth century most philosophers were academics, but not in France or England. In these countries they became academics only during the late nineteenth century. The present professors who are philosophers are generally not intellectuals, except for some individuals mostly in Continental universities. The philosophes were not professors but invariably freelance authors or littérateurs. They distinguished themselves from philosophers in not being metaphysical thinkers concerned with abstract ideas
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  • Revival: A History of Modern Culture: Volume II (1934)
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    Revival: A History of Modern Culture: Volume II (1934)

    The Enlightenment 1687 - 1776

    • Preserved Smith(Author)
    • 2018(Publication Date)
    • Routledge
      (Publisher)
    An economic and social cause of the triumph of reason over tradition at this epoch may be found in the evolution of the intellectual class to a dominant position in the state. The older privileged classes continued to appeal to the ancient authorities: the priest to the oracles of his religion, the noble to the law, the ruler to the army, and all to custom. The intellectual had but one weapon—his wits. Naturally he exalted the authority to which he could appeal, the standard of common sense and of logic. Moreover the intellectual class at this time, in its widest sense, coincided with the upper middle class, with sufficient means to buy books, sufficient taste to enjoy them, and sufficient leisure to think a little about them. The masses were still excluded from participation in the spiritual, as they were disinherited from the material, riches of society. With them, too strenuously engaged in the struggle for a livelihood to devote much time or strength to thought, the emotions rather than the intellect have always supplied the criterion of value. Modern times, since the end of the eighteenth century, have been increasingly irrational partly because they have been increasingly democratic. The Middle Ages were authoritative partly because the privileges of the ruling classes depended largely upon the force of custom and tradition. But the Enlightenment, between the two ages, brought to leadership just that literate public whose claims could be vindicated only by an appeal to reason and common sense. Then reigned a sort of graphocracy, or rule of writers, in which even revelation dissolved in criticism and in which even despotism was tempered by epigram.
    It would be wrong, however, to attribute the peculiar rationalism of the eighteenth century wholly, or even chiefly, to an economic cause. The mentality of a given epoch is conditioned not only by the soil of material institutions from which it grows, but by the climate of intellectual atmosphere in which it lives. This intellectual atmosphere is the worldview held by the dominant classes. The world-view of the Enlightenment was partly inherited from earlier centuries, and was partly reshaped by the new science. Inheriting from their ancestors the belief in absolute truth and in a reasonable and comprehensible universe, the philosophers of the Enlightenment found a new standard of truth in science, and a new scheme of the universe in the astronomy of the seventeenth century. Newton’s discovery of the law of gravitation seemed to offer a simple mathematical formula usable as a pattern for thought in every field. From natural science the new pattern was adopted in other fields of thought. History furnished a new knowledge of human nature which, it was felt, must be as much subject to scientific law as was inanimate nature. Gradually, institutions, politics, religion, education, psychology, and esthetics, were subjected to the yoke of physics, were assumed to be amenable to natural law, and were investigated, criticized, explained, and reformed, accordingly.
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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)
    philosophes adhered more to his principles than to his exceptions.
    More even than monarchs and aristocrats, the authors of the Encyclopédie distrusted the Church. Insisting on the average moral superiority of atheists and the superior beneficence of science over grace, Diderot proclaimed that ‘mankind will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest’.16 Voltaire, a persistent voice of anticlericalism, was the best-connected man of the eighteenth century. He corresponded with Catherine the Great, corrected the King of Prussia’s poetry, and influenced monarchs and statesmen all over Europe. His works were read in Sicily and Transylvania, plagiarized in Vienna, and translated into Swedish. Voltaire erected his own temple to ‘the architect of the universe, the great geometrician’, but regarded Christianity as an ‘infamous superstition to be eradicated – I do not say among the rabble, who are not worthy of being enlightened and who are apt for every yoke, but among the civilized and those who wish to think.’17 The progress of the Enlightenment can be measured in anticlerical acts: the expulsion of the Jesuits from Portugal in 1759; the tsar’s secularization of a great portfolio of Church property in 1761; the abolition of the Jesuit order in most of the rest of the West between 1764 and 1773; the thirty-eight thousand victims forced out of religious houses into lay life in Europe in the 1780s. In 1790 the King of Prussia proclaimed absolute authority over clergy in his realm. In 1795 a Spanish minister proposed the forfeiture of most of the Church’s remaining land. Meanwhile, at the most rarefied levels of the European elite, the cult of reason took on the characteristics of an alternative religion. In the rites of Freemasonry, a profane hierarchy celebrated the purity of its own wisdom, which Mozart brilliantly evoked in The Magic Flute
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  • Germany under the Old Regime 1600-1790
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    Germany under the Old Regime 1600-1790

    • John G. Gagliardo(Author)
    • 2014(Publication Date)
    • Routledge
      (Publisher)
    Pietism, for example, helped to reinforce both the conservative and the progressive tendencies referred to above – the latter because of its emphasis on an active welfare policy, the former because, setting its hopes for that policy chiefly on individual spiritual rebirth, it was uncritical of the existing social and political order. It is also true that the thinkers and writers whose work defined the German enlightenment differed sharply from their western European counterparts in one important respect: nearly all were professors or officials (or both, since professors were officials, after all, even when they had no governmental administrative responsibilities) and were therefore financially dependent on and professionally answerable to the political authority which appointed them. The ‘private’ philosophers – men outside the universities with independent fortunes, untouchable sinecures, or rich and benevolent patrons – who were so important to the evolution of the enlightenment in France or England scarcely existed in Germany; neither, therefore, did the more objectified ‘outsider’ perspective which made mordant criticism of any and all institutions and practices of public life possible. Such criticism was not altogether undangerous even in those countries, of course, since legal censorship existed and writers could be and were persecuted on occasion, especially in France. But since professors in Germany could lose their livelihood for reasons far more trivial than those for which they could legally be prosecuted, prudence dictated much caution in both teaching and writing
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