Explain the impact the Enlightenment on democracy and potential revolutionary thought

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

• Historians often call the eighteenth century the Enlightenment.
• Also called the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment was characterized by rational thought and the belief that all activities could be explained.
• Europe had been exhausted by the carnage of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648).
• To preserve peace, several rulers agreed to tolerate different sects of Christianity within the same
• realm.
• During the Enlightenment, theology lost its monopoly on providing answers to all human questions.
• This gave rise to science and a new age of discovery. The deductive logic of the former age was gradually replaced by empirical observation.
• Europe and America experienced tremendous economic, political, and social
• change during this time.

• Changes in the approach to political power. Before the Enlightenment, a large segment of the European population was tied to a class of nobles, and smaller groups of people were part of emerging trade and professional classes or free farmers.
• During the Enlightenment, many Europeans began to question how they were governed, and they sought to increase the political power of the lower classes.
• Evolving legal authority in England began to limit the power of the monarch,
• and the French questioned the authority of their king even more directly.
• The forces of change during the Enlightenment brought a new way of thinking about
• citizenship. Ordinary people came to believe that the state existed to protect everybody,
• not just the nobles. The nobles and other people who held power were frightened
• by this line of thinking.
• The Enlightenment was an international intellectual movement.
• Although diverse in political opinions, the philosophers of the Age of Reason produced a common idea about government.
o governments should exist to protect individual rights
o the best form of government was democracy.
o citizens had rights and that government's duty was to protect those rights.
o common people were to control the government under a social contract, or constitution,
o that spelled out the rights of citizens and limited governmental power.

• The Enlightenment brought an increased demand for democracy. Such thinking
• produced tension between the ruling class and the governed, and some of the