The Enlightenment was a sprawling intellectual,
philosophical, cultural, and social movement that spread through England,
France, Germany, and other parts of Europe during the 1700s.
Enabled by the Scientific Revolution, which had begun as early as 1500,
the Enlightenment represented about as big of a departure as possible
from the Middle Ages—the period in European history lasting from
roughly the fifth century to the fifteenth.
The millennium of the Middle Ages had been marked by unwavering
religious devotion and unfathomable cruelty. Rarely before or after
did the Church have as much power as it did during those thousand
years. With the Holy Roman Empire as a foundation, missions such
as the Crusades and Inquisition were conducted in part to
find and persecute heretics, often with torture and death. Although
standard at the time, such harsh injustices would eventually offend
and scare Europeans into change. Science, though encouraged
in the late Middle Ages as a form of piety and appreciation of God’s
creation, was frequently regarded as heresy, and those who tried
to explain miracles and other matters of faith faced harsh punishment.
Society was highly hierarchical, with serfdom a widespread practice.
There were no mandates regarding personal liberties or rights, and
many Europeans feared religion—either at the hands of an unmerciful
God or at the hands of the sometimes brutal Church itself.
The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, however,
opened a path for independent thought, and the fields of mathematics, astronomy,
physics, politics, economics, philosophy, and medicine were drastically
updated and expanded. The amount of new knowledge that emerged was
staggering. Just as important was the enthusiasm with which people
approached the Enlightenment: intellectual salons popped up in France,
philosophical discussions were held, and the increasingly literate
population read books and passed them around feverishly. The Enlightenment
and all of the new knowledge thus permeated nearly every facet of
civilized life. Not everyone participated, as many uneducated, rural
citizens were unable to share in the Enlightenment during its course.
But even their time would come, as the Enlightenment also prompted
the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which provided rural
dwellers with jobs and new cities in which to live.
Whether considered from an intellectual, political, or
social standpoint, the advancements of the Enlightenment transformed the
Western world into an intelligent and self-aware civilization. Moreover,
it directly inspired the creation of the world’s first great democracy,
the United States of America. The new freedoms and ideas sometimes
led to abuses—in particular, the descent of the French Revolution
from a positive, productive coup into tyranny and bedlam. In response
to the violence of the French Revolution, some Europeans began to
blame the Enlightenment’s attacks on tradition and breakdown of
norms for inducing the anarchy.
Indeed, it took time for people to overcome this opinion
and appreciate the Enlightenment’s beneficial effect on their daily
lives. But concrete, productive changes did, in fact, appear, under
guises as varied as the ideas that inspired them. The effects of
Enlightenment thought soon permeated both European and American
life, from improved women’s rights to more efficient steam engines, from
fairer judicial systems to increased educational opportunities, from
revolutionary economic theories to a rich array of literature and
music.
These ideas, works, and principles of the Enlightenment
would continue to affect Europe and the rest of the Western world
for decades and even centuries to come. Nearly every theory or fact
that is held in modern science has a foundation in the Enlightenment;
in fact, many remain just as they were established. Yet it is not
simply the knowledge attained during the Enlightenment that makes
the era so pivotal—it’s also the era’s groundbreaking and tenacious
new approaches to investigation, reasoning, and problem solving
that make it so important. Never before had people been so vocal
about making a difference in the world; although some may have been
persecuted for their new ideas, it nevertheless became indisputable
that thought had the power to incite real change. Just like calculus
or free trade, the very concept of freedom of expression had to
come from somewhere, and it too had firm roots in the Enlightenment.
