What is The Enlightenment?
Intellectual movement which marked the rise of the bourgeoisie in Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries, in which ideas of god, reason, nature, and human were shaped in adherance to capitalist ideology through revolutionary developments in art, music, philosophy and politics. Central to Enlightenment was the deification of Reason.
The rise of empirical and rational natural science (Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz and Newton), Renaissance art, and the Protestant Reformation laid the basis for the Enlightenment. For Luther, as for Bacon or Descartes, the way to truth lay in the application of human reason, rather than the authority of the Fathers of the Church.
Inevitably, Reason was applied to religion itself leading to Deism, especially in England and France, and the more radical products of the application of reason to religion: scepticism, atheism and materialism. The Enlightenment produced the first modern theories of psychology, language, political economy and ethics — Locke, Hobbes, David Hume, Adam Smith and Bentham in England, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot and Voltaire in France, Thomas Jefferson in America and Goethe, Schiller, Immanuel Kant and Fichte in Germany, for example.
Thus the Enlightenment became critical, reforming, and eventually revolutionary with an evolving critique of the arbitrary, authoritarian state and the concept of a higher form of social organization, based on natural rights and individual freedom which found expression as reform in England and revolution in France and America. (1)
