During the time of the Enlightenment and Great Awakening, colonists began to take a new view on life. The Enlightenment brought many new ideas and concepts on how the world worked. The Great Awakening brought forth the revival of a religious life. For example, throughout the Enlightenment, colonists started believing more in scientific theories rather than religious beliefs. Benjamin Franklin wanted to obtain the truth through experimentation and reason.
When Thomas Jefferson wrote that we were ‘dissolving the bands’ between Britain and the United States, he was putting into practice the political philosophies born from centuries of people being mistreated and ignored by tyrants, and stating unalienable rights given by God. The free-thinking sparked by The Enlightenment and The Great Awakening helped change society’s thinking about the power of government and people’s own power over political, religious and personal freedoms.[1] This all culminated in a bloody family feud, and two separate but equal nations. The Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The American Enlightenment and the Great Awakening were two very important motivators that changed the colonial society in America through religious beliefs, educational values, and the right to live one’s life according to each individual’s preference. The Great Awakening and the American Enlightenment movements were two events in history that signaled a grand distinction to the teachings among religious believers. New beliefs of how a person should worship in order to be considered in “God’s good graces” soon became an enormous discussion among colonists across the land. “Men of the cloth,” such as George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards were well respected and closely followed when preaching about the love of God and damnation.
In the 17th and 18th century the Enlightenment was a period of intellectual movement encompassing reason, individualism, and skepticism. The Scientific Revolution, which came from the enlightenment, resulted in new scientific findings, particularly in astronomy, which changed long-held beliefs about how space affects the natural world. These new revelations led people to doubt the established political and social hierarchies. The Enlightenment challenged traditional notions of hierarchy, including the king's 'divine right' to govern, the nobility's privileges, and the influence of religion on politics. Additionally, it served as an inspiration for the values of choice, equality, and independence as well as the fundamentals of human reason
The Enlightenment was a movement that emphasized a scientific and rational approach to problems. The Enlightenment writers generally believed that the power of reason could be used to improve society. (Pearson) One of the most important writers of this movement was John Locke, an Englishman, who wrote Two Treatises of Government in 1690. His view was that it was government’s job to protect the natural rights of “life, liberty, and ownership of property” (Pearson, ushistory.org).
The Enlightenment made American society more egalitarian, allowing people to relate to and believe that all people are equal and deserve equal opportunities and rights. The Great Awakening emphasized emotional religiosity or a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The colonists' perceptions of government and society as a whole changed as a result, and as a result, they rebelled against England. The Enlightenment emphasized logic, reason, progress, and science in its arguments. The Great Awakening argued for Christianity across social, economic, and educational divides.
America’s founding fathers used enlightenment to justify their freedom from British rule. American ideals clearly reflect themes from the enlightenment movement such as toleration, natural rights of men, and enlightened leadership. “Enlightenment encouraged thinkers and activists to question the social, political, and economic order around them, and offered concrete ideas about how societies could be reordered more effectively.” (Bentley 471) Ideas from the enlightenment era laid the foundation for the justification of the revolutions that took place in the Americas during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The Enlightenment was the era that followed the Scientific Revolution, and it was heavily influenced by the revolution. It did this by “extending its ideas to new disciplines such as demography, the science of man, and anthropology; by transforming chemistry, the life sciences (biology), and the study of electricity; and by vastly developing the power of mathematics as the language of science” (Reill & Wilson). Lastly, the Scientific Revolution, along with the Enlightenment, helped to pave the way for science as is known to this
Enlightenment was a concept that inspired a new way of thinking of the people. In the newly formed United States of America, enlightenment shaped the way the new government was run. Scientific reasoning was applied to politics, religion, and science. Enlightenment saved music, art, and literature programs in colleges. Enlightenment in Europe led to drastically altered views on philosophy, politics, and communications.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Europe was experiencing a changing of the guard at the hands of the philosophes, a group of social reformers from the nobility and middle class. Branded by the philosophes as an intellectual movement advocating for the application of reason and individualism in all aspects of life, the Enlightenment, influenced by the ideas of the Scientific Revolution, sparked discussion in the hopes of bettering society and rounding it into its most ideal form. Although it was a truly international and cosmopolitan movement, one of its most important proponents was the French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), author of works such as Discourse on the Origins of the Inequality of Mankind and The Social Contract. Rousseau epitomized the Enlightenment and its core ideas, that individual liberty should be of utmost importance and government and religion should fulfill the needs of the general will.
I agree that the Enlightenment was force for positive change in society. The Enlightenment was one was the most important intellectual movements in History, as it dominated and influenced the way people thought in Europe in the late 17th and 18th centuries. We will look at how it ultimately influenced the American and French Revolution which is still strongly governed by these ideas and principles today. The Age of Enlightenment was a European movement which emphasizing reasoning and individualism in preference to tradition.
During the seventeenth century, many of Europe’s diverse and numerous countries were going through countless political, economic, and cultural transformations. The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment were two of the greatest, most important changes of the early modern era which greatly altered the course of history in most of Europe. People were starting to question and challenge widely accepted beliefs and applying approaches to knowledge rooted in human reason to the physical universe and human affairs. The study of history often focuses on these events and its effects on Europe, excluding or ignoring its effects on places outside of Europe. The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment both sparked interests in science in China and
The Enlightenment was a time period in which people began to embrace individuality and many Enlightenment thinkers arose. The Enlightenment was a movement that was highly based upon reason and logic. It occurred around the mid-1700’s and helped develop a new way of life. John Locke was an influential thinker during this time. John Locke is a french philosopher and writer who developed Natural Rights.
“God, who has given the world to men in common, has also given them reason to make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience” (Locke, 35). The Scientific Revolution concentrated on understanding the physical world through astronomical and mathematical calculations, or testable knowledge. The Enlightenment focused more on “Spreading of faith in reason and in universal rights and laws” (Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, 535). While the Scientific Revolution preceded the Enlightenment, both time periods sought to limit and challenge the power of the Church, through the spread of science, reason and intellect, and political philosophies. The Scientific Revolution began with Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1542) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) wanting to understand the movement of the planets beyond what they authorities had told them.
The Enlightenment was a period during the 1600 and 1700s where authority, power, government and law was questioned by philosophers. The causes of the Enlightenment was the Thirty Years’ War, centuries of mistreatment at the hands of monarchies and the church, greater exploration of the world, and European thinkers’ interest in the world (scientific study). A large part of the Enlightenment was natural law, which was the belief that people should live their lives and organize their society on the basis of rules and precepts laid down by nature or God; the principles of the Enlightenment in the 1600s through the 1700s influenced the development of the USA by advocating religious and social freedom, freeing the people from oppression, and providing
