Which Three Topics Became a Major Focus of the Enlightenment

European politics, philosophy, science and communications were radically reoriented during the grade of the “long 18th century” (1685-1815) as office of a motility referred to by its participants as the Age of Reason, or simply the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers in Britain, in France and throughout Europe questioned traditional potency and embraced the notion that humanity could be improved through rational alter.

The Enlightenment produced numerous books, essays, inventions, scientific discoveries, laws, wars and revolutions. The American and French Revolutions were direct inspired past Enlightenment ideals and respectively marked the elevation of its influence and the starting time of its reject. The Enlightenment ultimately gave way to 19th-century Romanticism.

The Early Enlightenment: 1685-1730

The Enlightenment’s of import 17th-century precursors included the Englishmen Francis Salary and Thomas Hobbes, the Frenchman René Descartes and the central natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution, including Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Its roots are usually traced to 1680s England, where in the span of three years Isaac Newton published his “Principia Mathematica” (1686) and John Locke his “Essay Concerning Homo Agreement” (1689)—two works that provided the scientific, mathematical and philosophical toolkit for the Enlightenment’s major advances.

Locke argued that homo nature was mutable and that knowledge was gained through accumulated experience rather than by accessing some sort of outside truth. Newton’s calculus and optical theories provided the powerful Enlightenment metaphors for precisely measured modify and illumination.

There was no unmarried, unified Enlightenment. Instead, information technology is possible to speak of the French Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment and the English language, German, Swiss or American Enlightenment. Individual Enlightenment thinkers oft had very different approaches. Locke differed from David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau from Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson from Frederick the Great. Their differences and disagreements, though, emerged out of the common Enlightenment themes of rational questioning and belief in progress through dialogue.

The High Enlightenment: 1730-1780

Centered on the dialogues and publications of the French “philosophes” (Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Buffon and Denis Diderot), the Loftier Enlightenment might best exist summed up by one historian’south summary of Voltaire’s “Philosophical Dictionary”: “a chaos of clear ideas.” Foremost among these was the notion that everything in the universe could be rationally demystified and cataloged. The signature publication of the period was Diderot’s “Encyclopédie” (1751-77), which brought together leading authors to produce an ambitious compilation of human knowledge.

It was an age of enlightened despots like Frederick the Great, who unified, rationalized and modernized Prussia in between brutal multi-year wars with Austria, and of enlightened would-exist revolutionaries similar Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, whose “Declaration of Independence” (1776) framed the American Revolution in terms taken from of Locke’due south essays.

It was also a time of religious (and anti-religious) innovation, as Christians sought to reposition their faith along rational lines and deists and materialists argued that the universe seemed to determine its own class without God’s intervention. Locke, along with French philosopher Pierre Bayle, began to champion the idea of the separation of Church building and State. Surreptitious societies—like the Freemasons, the Bavarian Illuminati and the Rosicrucians—flourished, offering European men (and a few women) new modes of fellowship, esoteric ritual and mutual assistance. Coffeehouses, newspapers and literary salons emerged as new venues for ideas to circulate.

The Late Enlightenment and Across: 1780-1815

The French Revolution of 1789 was the culmination of the High Enlightenment vision of throwing out the onetime government to remake guild forth rational lines, but it devolved into bloody terror that showed the limits of its own ideas and led, a decade afterward, to the rise of Napoleon. Still, its goal of egalitarianism attracted the admiration of the early on feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of “Frankenstein” writer Mary Shelley) and inspired both the Haitian war of independence and the radical racial inclusivism of Paraguay’south first post-independence government.

Enlightened rationality gave way to the wildness of Romanticism, but 19th-century Liberalism and Classicism—not to mention 20th-century Modernism—all owe a heavy debt to the thinkers of the Enlightenment.