The Enlightenment (jan 1, 1650 – jan 1, 1800)

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The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, was a European intellectual and philosophical movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and humanity were created into a worldview that inspired and formed revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics. The central parts of the Enlightenment are the use and celebration of reason, the power by which humans understand the universe and improve their own condition. The goals of rational humanity were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness. During the Enlightenment, a lot of philosophical directions grew. Rationalism (logic: reason as a source of knowledge), empiricism (knowledge comes through experience), criticism (critical thinking, argumentation), egalitarianism (everybody is born equal) and deism (rejection of organized religion) characterized this period.

French historians traditionally place the Enlightenment between 1715 and 1789 (the beginning of the French Revolution). International historians begin the period in the 1620s, with the start of the scientific revolution. However, in Europe, the Enlightenment begins the 1650s. The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on reason as the primary source of authority, legitimacy and came to advance ideas like progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government and separation of church and state. During the Enlightenment in the middle class, more people were literate, had good manners, restraint, self-control, and common sense. Appearances, formal style and elegance characterized this period of time and the neoclassical architecture was also an important factor.

A few major writers of the Enlightenment are John Locke, Isaac Newton, Voltaire, and Benjamin Franklin. All of these human-beings contributed to an evolving critique of the arbitrary and to sketch the outline of a higher form of social organization, based on natural rights and functioning as a political democracy.

The roots of the Enlightenment can be found in the humanism of the Renaissance, with its emphasis on the study of Classical literature. One of the most important sources of what became the Enlightenment were the rational and empirical methods of discovering the truth that was introduced by the scientific revolution. The immediate consequences of the Enlightenment were the birth of democracy and liberalism. The French Revolution (1789-1799) and the American Revolution (1775-1783) were almost direct results of Enlightenment thinking. However, there was a countermovement called Romanticism that followed the Enlightenment in the late 18th and mid-19th centuries.

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