Enlightenment

• The Enlightenment or Age of Light refers to the belief that the musty old ideas needed to be exposed to rational investigation to see if they were still valuable
• The bright light of reason needed to shine on tradition
• Increasing abundance and novelty creeping into the everyday lives of Europeans


  • Coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, and other commodities led to experimentation
  • Cultivation of new foods from the Americas like potatoes and corn increased available calories
  • Tens of thousands of Europeans had traveled the world and experienced other social orders first hand
• Europe had previously been a land of famine and mere subsistence for essentially all of its history
• The availability of new foods meant that the world didn't have to be perpetually on the brink of starvation and catastrophe
• Travelers discovered that people across Asia didn't seem as quarrelsome as Europeans, and that some societies gave less weight to a person's parentage and more to their individual skills and talents
• Rational


  (in the Enlightenment) the belief that musty old ideas needed to be exposed to rational investigation to see if they were still valuable
• Writers who criticized outmoded ways of life

  • Montesquieu
  • Voltaire
• Montesquieu published the Persian Letters in 1721, in which Uzbek visitors find Europe amusing if not shocking
• Voltaire valued honesty and those who lived simple lives "cultivating their gardens", as he famously put it in his satirical novel Candide
• Rousseau's ideas


  • Promoted middle-class values like hard work, practicality, and domesticity for women
  • Described a boy named Emile who grows up in the countryside and learns practical skills instead of rote learning
• Wealthy women in Europe instituted the Enlightenment salon: regular get-togethers in their homes to hear the latest ideas, learn about the latest books, or meet the latest philosopher-influencers
• Instead of looking to the courts for fashion inspiration, men like Voltaire sported cottons from India and loose bathrobe type garments called banyans
• Although imported foreign cottons were still illegal in France, many people now wore them, including servants
• The Encyclopedie provided discussions of topics such as natural rights and the status of women, and its main editor Denis Diderot wrote "All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings"
• Men traditionally wore make-up, wigs, and high heels, but Rousseau believed they should take these off and be natural
• Imported foreign cottons were still illegal in France, but many people now wore them, including servants
• Denis Diderot: '"All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings."'
• Diderot favored social and political reform
• The Encyclopedia contained technical drawings of machinery, including machinery for mining
• Mining was about to become extremely important, thanks to coal
• Enlightenment aims were more worldly than spiritual
• Deists


  Argued that God existed but that he didn't influence everyday life after having set the machine of the universe in motion
• Many important "founding fathers" of the United States were deists
• Voltaire was outraged by the torture of Jean Calas, who had been accused of murdering his son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism
• Calas was waterboarded and had every bone in his body broken before eventually dying under torture
• Enlightenment views fed into rising movements in Britain, France, the Netherlands, and their colonies to abolish slavery
• In 1770, the French Catholic abbé Guillaume Raynal laid out the violent devastation of native peoples by invading Europeans
• In 1788 the freed slave Olaudah Equiano described the middle passage after he had been kidnapped in present-day Nigeria and enslaved
• Equiano's riveting memoir stirred freedmen and slaves to struggle for abolition
• Adam Smith


  Took on the mercantilist theory that global wealth was static and states could only increase wealth by taking it from others
• Adam Smith


  Advocated for manufacturing, the division of labor, and free trade
• Adam Smith


  Believed that the sum of all self-interests would make for a balanced, harmonious, and prosperous society
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau


  "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains"
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau


  Believed that the state embodied the best that was in the collective community, and individuals needed to give the state unconditional obedience
• Emmanuel Kant


  "Dare to Know" - advanced the Enlightenment's commitment to the human mind and the ability of every person to think for themselves
• Upper-class Jewish women across Europe found the world of ideas so inspiring that they began salons
• Philosopher and author Moses Mendelssohn used the more tolerant atmosphere to express his optimism about the future of Jews in Europe
• Pseudoscientific "reason" has been used to justify many forms of structural inequality, from racism to sexism to class systems
• Enlightenment challenges to the idea that we already were living in the best of all possible worlds would help us to imagine, and eventually live in, better worlds--albeit ones that are still profoundly imperfect