The influence of science also began appearing more commonly in poetry and literature during the Enlightenment. Some poetry became infused with scientific metaphor and imagery, while other poems were written directly about scientific topics. After Newton's death in , poems were composed in his honour for decades. Hume and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed a " science of man ", [36] which was expressed historically in works by authors including James Burnett , Adam Ferguson , John Millar and William Robertson , all of whom merged a scientific study of how humans behaved in ancient and primitive cultures with a strong awareness of the determining forces of modernity.
Modern sociology largely originated from this movement [37] and Hume's philosophical concepts that directly influenced James Madison and thus the U. Constitution and as popularised by Dugald Stewart , would be the basis of classical liberalism. In , Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations , often considered the first work on modern economics as it had an immediate impact on British economic policy that continues into the 21st century. Smith acknowledged indebtedness and possibly was the original English translator. Cesare Beccaria , a jurist, criminologist, philosopher and politician and one of the great Enlightenment writers, became famous for his masterpiece Of Crimes and Punishments , later translated into 22 languages, [41] which condemned torture and the death penalty and was a founding work in the field of penology and the Classical School of criminology by promoting criminal justice.
Another prominent intellectual was Francesco Mario Pagano , who wrote important studies such as Saggi Politici Political Essays, , one of the major works of the Enlightenment in Naples; and Considerazioni sul processo criminale Considerations on the criminal trial, , which established him as an international authority on criminal law.
The Enlightenment has long been hailed as the foundation of modern Western political and intellectual culture. This thesis has been widely accepted by Anglophone scholars and has been reinforced by the large-scale studies by Robert Darnton , Roy Porter and most recently by Jonathan Israel.
John Locke, one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, [46] based his governance philosophy in social contract theory , a subject that permeated Enlightenment political thought. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes ushered in this new debate with his work Leviathan in Hobbes also developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: While quite different works, Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau agreed that a social contract, in which the government's authority lies in the consent of the governed, [49] is necessary for man to live in civil society.
Locke defines the state of nature as a condition in which humans are rational and follow natural law, in which all men are born equal and with the right to life, liberty and property. However, when one citizen breaks the Law of Nature both the transgressor and the victim enter into a state of war, from which it is virtually impossible to break free. Therefore, Locke said that individuals enter into civil society to protect their natural rights via an "unbiased judge" or common authority, such as courts, to appeal to.
Contrastingly, Rousseau's conception relies on the supposition that "civil man" is corrupted, while "natural man" has no want he cannot fulfill himself. Natural man is only taken out of the state of nature when the inequality associated with private property is established. This is embodied in the sovereignty of the general will , the moral and collective legislative body constituted by citizens. Locke is known for his statement that individuals have a right to "Life, Liberty and Property" and his belief that the natural right to property is derived from labor.
The philosophes argued that the establishment of a contractual basis of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism , the scientific method , religious tolerance and the organization of states into self-governing republics through democratic means. In this view, the tendency of the philosophes in particular to apply rationality to every problem is considered the essential change. Although much of Enlightenment political thought was dominated by social contract theorists, both David Hume and Adam Ferguson criticized this camp.
Hume's essay Of the Original Contract argues that governments derived from consent are rarely seen and civil government is grounded in a ruler's habitual authority and force. It is precisely because of the ruler's authority over-and-against the subject, that the subject tacitly consents and Hume says that the subjects would "never imagine that their consent made him sovereign", rather the authority did so. In his An Essay on the History of Civil Society , Ferguson uses the four stages of progress, a theory that was very popular in Scotland at the time, to explain how humans advance from a hunting and gathering society to a commercial and civil society without "signing" a social contract.
Both Rousseau and Locke's social contract theories rest on the presupposition of natural rights , which are not a result of law or custom, but are things that all men have in pre-political societies and are therefore universal and inalienable. The most famous natural right formulation comes from John Locke in his Second Treatise , when he introduces the state of nature. For Locke, the law of nature is grounded on mutual security or the idea that one cannot infringe on another's natural rights, as every man is equal and has the same inalienable rights.
These natural rights include perfect equality and freedom, as well as the right to preserve life and property. Locke also argued against slavery on the basis that enslaving yourself goes against the law of nature because you cannot surrender your own rights, your freedom is absolute and no one can take it from you.
Additionally, Locke argues that one person cannot enslave another because it is morally reprehensible, although he introduces a caveat by saying that enslavement of a lawful captive in time of war would not go against one's natural rights. As a spillover of the Enlightenment, nonsecular beliefs expressed first by Quakers and then by Protestant evangelicals in Britain and the United States emerged. To these groups, slavery became "repugnant to our religion" and a "crime in the sight of God.
The leaders of the Enlightenment were not especially democratic, as they more often look to absolute monarchs as the key to imposing reforms designed by the intellectuals. Voltaire despised democracy and said the absolute monarch must be enlightened and must act as dictated by reason and justice — in other words, be a "philosopher-king". In several nations, rulers welcomed leaders of the Enlightenment at court and asked them to help design laws and programs to reform the system, typically to build stronger states.
These rulers are called "enlightened despots" by historians. Joseph was over-enthusiastic, announcing many reforms that had little support so that revolts broke out and his regime became a comedy of errors and nearly all his programs were reversed. In Poland, the model constitution of expressed Enlightenment ideals, but was in effect for only one year before the nation was partitioned among its neighbors. More enduring were the cultural achievements, which created a nationalist spirit in Poland. Frederick the Great , the king of Prussia from to , saw himself as a leader of the Enlightenment and patronized philosophers and scientists at his court in Berlin.
Voltaire, who had been imprisoned and maltreated by the French government, was eager to accept Frederick's invitation to live at his palace. The Enlightenment has been frequently linked to the French Revolution of One view of the political changes that occurred during the Enlightenment is that the " consent of the governed " philosophy as delineated by Locke in Two Treatises of Government represented a paradigm shift from the old governance paradigm under feudalism known as the " divine right of kings ".
In this view, the revolutions of the late s and early s were caused by the fact that this governance paradigm shift often could not be resolved peacefully and therefore violent revolution was the result. Clearly a governance philosophy where the king was never wrong was in direct conflict with one whereby citizens by natural law had to consent to the acts and rulings of their government.
Alexis de Tocqueville proposed the French Revolution as the inevitable result of the radical opposition created in the 18th century between the monarchy and the men of letters of the Enlightenment. These men of letters constituted a sort of "substitute aristocracy that was both all-powerful and without real power". This illusory power came from the rise of "public opinion", born when absolutist centralization removed the nobility and the bourgeoisie from the political sphere. The "literary politics" that resulted promoted a discourse of equality and was hence in fundamental opposition to the monarchical regime.
Enlightenment era religious commentary was a response to the preceding century of religious conflict in Europe, especially the Thirty Years' War. For moderate Christians, this meant a return to simple Scripture. John Locke abandoned the corpus of theological commentary in favor of an "unprejudiced examination" of the Word of God alone.
He determined the essence of Christianity to be a belief in Christ the redeemer and recommended avoiding more detailed debate. Enlightenment scholars sought to curtail the political power of organized religion and thereby prevent another age of intolerant religious war. A number of novel ideas about religion developed with the Enlightenment, including deism and talk of atheism. According to Thomas Paine , deism is the simple belief in God the Creator , with no reference to the Bible or any other miraculous source. Instead, the deist relies solely on personal reason to guide his creed, [70] which was eminently agreeable to many thinkers of the time.
Wilson and Reill note: Rather, they were critics of orthodox belief, wedded rather to skepticism, deism, vitalism, or perhaps pantheism". That is, since atheists gave themselves to no Supreme Authority and no law and had no fear of eternal consequences, they were far more likely to disrupt society. He would be a god to himself, and the satisfaction of his own will the sole measure and end of all his actions.
The "Radical Enlightenment" [77] [78] promoted the concept of separating church and state, [79] an idea that is often credited to English philosopher John Locke — For Locke, this created a natural right in the liberty of conscience, which he said must therefore remain protected from any government authority. These views on religious tolerance and the importance of individual conscience, along with the social contract, became particularly influential in the American colonies and the drafting of the United States Constitution.
He previously had supported successful efforts to disestablish the Church of England in Virginia [82] and authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. The Enlightenment took hold in most European countries, often with a specific local emphasis. For example, in France it became associated with anti-government and anti-Church radicalism, while in Germany it reached deep into the middle classes, where it expressed a spiritualistic and nationalistic tone without threatening governments or established churches.
In France, the government was hostile, and the philosophes fought against its censorship, sometimes being imprisoned or hounded into exile. The British government, for the most part, ignored the Enlightenment's leaders in England and Scotland, although it did give Isaac Newton a knighthood and a very lucrative government office. The very existence of an English Enlightenment has been hotly debated by scholars.
The majority of textbooks on British history make little or no mention of an English Enlightenment. However, its leading intellectuals such as Edward Gibbon , [89] Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson were all quite conservative and supportive of the standing order. Porter says the reason was that Enlightenment had come early to England and had succeeded so that the culture had accepted political liberalism, philosophical empiricism, and religious toleration of the sort that intellectuals on the continent had to fight for against powerful odds.
Furthermore, England rejected the collectivism of the continent and emphasized the improvement of individuals as the main goal of enlightenment. In the Scottish Enlightenment, Scotland's major cities created an intellectual infrastructure of mutually supporting institutions such as universities, reading societies, libraries, periodicals, museums and masonic lodges. Several Americans, especially Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson , played a major role in bringing Enlightenment ideas to the New World and in influencing British and French thinkers.
Thinkers such as Paine, Locke and Rousseau all take Native American cultural practices as examples of natural freedom. During the Enlightenment there was a great emphasis upon liberty , republicanism and religious tolerance. There was no respect for monarchy or inherited political power. Deists reconciled science and religion by rejecting prophecies, miracles and Biblical theology.
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Prussia took the lead among the German states in sponsoring the political reforms that Enlightenment thinkers urged absolute rulers to adopt. There were important movements as well in the smaller states of Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover and the Palatinate. In each case, Enlightenment values became accepted and led to significant political and administrative reforms that laid the groundwork for the creation of modern states.
The reforms were aided by the country's strong urban structure and influential commercial groups and modernized pre Saxony along the lines of classic Enlightenment principles. Before , the German upper classes looked to France for intellectual, cultural and architectural leadership, as French was the language of high society. Christian Wolff — was the pioneer as a writer who expounded the Enlightenment to German readers and legitimized German as a philosophic language.
Johann Gottfried von Herder — broke new ground in philosophy and poetry, as a leader of the Sturm und Drang movement of proto-Romanticism. Weimar Classicism Weimarer Klassik was a cultural and literary movement based in Weimar that sought to establish a new humanism by synthesizing Romantic, classical and Enlightenment ideas.
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The movement from until involved Herder as well as polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — and Friedrich Schiller — , a poet and historian. Herder argued that every folk had its own particular identity, which was expressed in its language and culture. This legitimized the promotion of German language and culture and helped shape the development of German nationalism. Schiller's plays expressed the restless spirit of his generation, depicting the hero's struggle against social pressures and the force of destiny.
German music, sponsored by the upper classes, came of age under composers Johann Sebastian Bach — , Joseph Haydn — and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Kant's work contained basic tensions that would continue to shape German thought — and indeed all of European philosophy — well into the 20th century. The German Enlightenment won the support of princes, aristocrats and the middle classes and it permanently reshaped the culture. In , Prussia issued an "Edict on Religion" that forbade preaching any sermon that undermined popular belief in the Holy Trinity and the Bible.
The goal was to avoid skepticism, deism and theological disputes that might impinge on domestic tranquility. Men who doubted the value of Enlightenment favoured the measure, but so too did many supporters. German universities had created a closed elite that could debate controversial issues among themselves, but spreading them to the public was seen as too risky. This intellectual elite was favoured by the state, but that might be reversed if the process of the Enlightenment proved politically or socially destabilizing.
The Enlightenment played a distinctive, if small, role in the history of Italy.
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Leopold II of Tuscany abolished the death penalty in Tuscany and reduced censorship. From Naples, Antonio Genovesi —69 influenced a generation of southern Italian intellectuals and university students. His textbook "Diceosina, o Sia della Filosofia del Giusto e dell'Onesto" was a controversial attempt to mediate between the history of moral philosophy on the one hand and the specific problems encountered by 18th-century commercial society on the other.
It contained the greater part of Genovesi's political, philosophical and economic thought — guidebook for Neapolitan economic and social development. Pietro Verri was a leading economist in Lombardy. Historian Joseph Schumpeter states he was "the most important pre-Smithian authority on Cheapness-and-Plenty". In Russia, the government began to actively encourage the proliferation of arts and sciences in the midth century. This era produced the first Russian university, library, theatre, public museum and independent press. Like other enlightened despots , Catherine the Great played a key role in fostering the arts, sciences and education.
She used her own interpretation of Enlightenment ideals, assisted by notable international experts such as Voltaire by correspondence and in residence world class scientists such as Leonhard Euler and Peter Simon Pallas. The national Enlightenment differed from its Western European counterpart in that it promoted further modernization of all aspects of Russian life and was concerned with attacking the institution of serfdom in Russia. The Russian enlightenment centered on the individual instead of societal enlightenment and encouraged the living of an enlightened life.
However, it lacked the skeptical and critical spirit of the European Enlightenment. The political system was built on republicanism , but was unable to defend itself against powerful neighbors Russia, Prussia and Austria as they repeatedly sliced off regions until nothing was left of independent Poland. Warsaw was a main centre after , with an expansion of schools and educational institutions and the arts patronage held at the Royal Castle.
The movement went into decline with the Third Partition of Poland — a national tragedy inspiring a short period of sentimental writing — and ended in , replaced by Romanticism. The Enlightenment has always been contested territory. According to Keith Thomas, its supporters "hail it as the source of everything that is progressive about the modern world. For them, it stands for freedom of thought, rational inquiry, critical thinking, religious tolerance, political liberty, scientific achievement, the pursuit of happiness, and hope for the future.
From the start, conservative and clerical defenders of traditional religion attacked materialism and skepticism as evil forces that encouraged immorality. By , they pointed to the Terror during the French Revolution as confirmation of their predictions. As the Enlightenment was ending, Romantic philosophers argued that excessive dependence on reason was a mistake perpetuated by the Enlightenment because it disregarded the bonds of history, myth, faith, and tradition that were necessary to hold society together.
From Immanuel Kant 's essay "Beantwortung der Frage: However, scholars have never agreed on a definition of the Enlightenment, or on its chronological or geographical extent. Not until the late nineteenth century did English scholars agree they were talking about "the Enlightenment".
Enlightenment historiography began in the period itself, from what Enlightenment figures said about their work. A dominant element was the intellectual angle they took. Bertrand Russell saw the Enlightenment as a phase in a progressive development which began in antiquity and that reason and challenges to the established order were constant ideals throughout that time.
Although many of these philosophical ideals were picked up by Catholics, Russell argues that by the 18th century the Enlightenment was the principal manifestation of the schism that began with Martin Luther. Jonathan Israel rejects the attempts of postmodern and Marxian historians to understand the revolutionary ideas of the period purely as by-products of social and economic transformations. There is little consensus on the precise beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, though the beginning of the 18th century or the middle of the 17th century are often used as epochs.
If taken back to the midth century, the Enlightenment would trace its origins to Descartes ' Discourse on the Method , published in Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant. Extending Horkheimer and Adorno's argument, intellectual historian Jason Josephson-Storm has argued that any idea of the Age of Enlightenment as a clearly defined period that is separate from the earlier Renaissance and later Romanticism or Counter-Enlightenment constitutes a myth.
Josephson-Storm points out that there are vastly different and mutually contradictory periodizations of the Enlightenment depending on nation, field of study, and school of thought; that the term and category of "Enlightenment" referring to the scientific revolution was actually applied after the fact; that the Enlightenment did not see an increase in disenchantment or the dominance of the mechanistic worldview ; and that a blur in the early modern ideas of the Humanities and natural sciences makes it hard to circumscribe a Scientific Revolution.
In the s, study of the Enlightenment expanded to include the ways Enlightenment ideas spread to European colonies and how they interacted with indigenous cultures and how the Enlightenment took place in formerly unstudied areas such as Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Poland, Hungary and Russia. Habermas described the creation of the "bourgeois public sphere" in 18th-century Europe, containing the new venues and modes of communication allowing for rational exchange.
Habermas said that the public sphere was bourgeois, egalitarian, rational and independent from the state, making it the ideal venue for intellectuals to critically examine contemporary politics and society, away from the interference of established authority. While the public sphere is generally an integral component of the social study of the Enlightenment, other historians have questioned whether the public sphere had these characteristics.
In contrast to the intellectual historiographical approach of the Enlightenment, which examines the various currents or discourses of intellectual thought within the European context during the 17th and 18th centuries, the cultural or social approach examines the changes that occurred in European society and culture. This approach studies the process of changing sociabilities and cultural practices during the Enlightenment. One of the primary elements of the culture of the Enlightenment was the rise of the public sphere , a "realm of communication marked by new arenas of debate, more open and accessible forms of urban public space and sociability, and an explosion of print culture", in the late 17th century and 18th century.
The values of this bourgeois public sphere included holding reason to be supreme, considering everything to be open to criticism the public sphere is critical , and the opposition of secrecy of all sorts.
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The creation of the public sphere has been associated with two long-term historical trends: The modern nation state, in its consolidation of public power, created by counterpoint a private realm of society independent of the state, which allowed for the public sphere. Capitalism also increased society's autonomy and self-awareness , as well as an increasing need for the exchange of information. The context for the rise of the public sphere was the economic and social change commonly associated with the Industrial Revolution: Meanwhile, the colonial experience most European states had colonial empires in the 18th century began to expose European society to extremely heterogeneous cultures, leading to the breaking down of "barriers between cultural systems, religious divides, gender differences and geographical areas".
The word "public" implies the highest level of inclusivity — the public sphere by definition should be open to all. However, this sphere was only public to relative degrees. Enlightenment thinkers frequently contrasted their conception of the "public" with that of the people: Condorcet contrasted "opinion" with populace, Marmontel "the opinion of men of letters" with "the opinion of the multitude" and d'Alembert the "truly enlightened public" with "the blind and noisy multitude".
Because of the focus on reason over superstition, the Enlightenment cultivated the arts. Areas of study such as literature, philosophy, science, and the fine arts increasingly explored subject matter to which the general public, in addition to the previously more segregated professionals and patrons, could relate. As musicians depended more and more on public support, public concerts became increasingly popular and helped supplement performers' and composers' incomes.
The concerts also helped them to reach a wider audience. Handel , for example, epitomized this with his highly public musical activities in London. He gained considerable fame there with performances of his operas and oratorios. The music of Haydn and Mozart , with their Viennese Classical styles, are usually regarded as being the most in line with the Enlightenment ideals.
The desire to explore, record and systematize knowledge had a meaningful impact on music publications. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 's Dictionnaire de musique published in Geneva and in Paris was a leading text in the late 18th century. From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period , which was a historical survey and an attempt to rationalize elements in music systematically over time. As the economy and the middle class expanded, there was an increasing number of amateur musicians. One manifestation of this involved women, who became more involved with music on a social level.
Women were already engaged in professional roles as singers and increased their presence in the amateur performers' scene, especially with keyboard music. The majority of the works that were published were for keyboard, voice and keyboard and chamber ensemble. The increasing study of the fine arts, as well as access to amateur-friendly published works, led to more people becoming interested in reading and discussing music.
Music magazines, reviews and critical works which suited amateurs as well as connoisseurs began to surface. The philosophes spent a great deal of energy disseminating their ideas among educated men and women in cosmopolitan cities. They used many venues, some of them quite new. In the midst of all the governments that decide the fate of men; in the bosom of so many states, the majority of them despotic It is the realm of talent and of thought.
The Republic of Letters was the sum of a number of Enlightenment ideals: The salon was the principal social institution of the republic [] and "became the civil working spaces of the project of Enlightenment". In France, the established men of letters gens de lettres had fused with the elites les grands of French society by the midth century. This led to the creation of an oppositional literary sphere, Grub Street , the domain of a "multitude of versifiers and would-be authors". The writers of Grub Street, the Grub Street Hacks, were left feeling bitter about the relative success of the men of letters [] and found an outlet for their literature which was typified by the libelle.
Written mostly in the form of pamphlets, the libelles "slandered the court, the Church, the aristocracy, the academies, the salons, everything elevated and respectable, including the monarchy itself". It was Grub Street literature that was most read by the public during the Enlightenment. The increased consumption of reading materials of all sorts was one of the key features of the "social" Enlightenment. Developments in the Industrial Revolution allowed consumer goods to be produced in greater quantities at lower prices, encouraging the spread of books, pamphlets, newspapers and journals — "media of the transmission of ideas and attitudes".
Commercial development likewise increased the demand for information, along with rising populations and increased urbanisation. Literacy rates are difficult to gauge, but in France the rates doubled over the course of the 18th century. Reading underwent serious changes in the 18th century. In particular, Rolf Engelsing has argued for the existence of a Reading Revolution. Until , reading was done intensively: After , people began to read "extensively", finding as many books as they could, increasingly reading them alone. The vast majority of the reading public could not afford to own a private library and while most of the state-run "universal libraries" set up in the 17th and 18th centuries were open to the public, they were not the only sources of reading material.
Intended for a largely rural and semi-literate audience these books included almanacs, retellings of medieval romances and condensed versions of popular novels, among other things. Libraries that lent out their material for a small price started to appear and occasionally bookstores would offer a small lending library to their patrons. Coffee houses commonly offered books, journals and sometimes even popular novels to their customers. The Tatler and The Spectator , two influential periodicals sold from to , were closely associated with coffee house culture in London, being both read and produced in various establishments in the city.
It is extremely difficult to determine what people actually read during the Enlightenment. For example, examining the catalogs of private libraries gives an image skewed in favor of the classes wealthy enough to afford libraries and also ignores censored works unlikely to be publicly acknowledged. For this reason, a study of publishing would be much more fruitful for discerning reading habits. Across continental Europe, but in France especially, booksellers and publishers had to negotiate censorship laws of varying strictness.
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Indeed, many publishing companies were conveniently located outside France so as to avoid overzealous French censors. They would smuggle their merchandise across the border, where it would then be transported to clandestine booksellers or small-time peddlers. Readers were more interested in sensationalist stories about criminals and political corruption than they were in political theory itself. The second most popular category, "general works" those books "that did not have a dominant motif and that contained something to offend almost everyone in authority" , demonstrated a high demand for generally low-brow subversive literature.
However, these works never became part of literary canon and are largely forgotten today as a result. A healthy, legal publishing industry existed throughout Europe, although established publishers and book sellers occasionally ran afoul of the law. A genre that greatly rose in importance was that of scientific literature.
Natural history in particular became increasingly popular among the upper classes.
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Students in Enlightenment universities and academies were taught these subjects to prepare them for careers as diverse as medicine and theology. As shown by Matthew Daniel Eddy, natural history in this context was a very middle class pursuit and operated as a fertile trading zone for the interdisciplinary exchange of diverse scientific ideas.
The target audience of natural history was French polite society, evidenced more by the specific discourse of the genre than by the generally high prices of its works. Naturalists catered to polite society's desire for erudition — many texts had an explicit instructive purpose. However, natural history was often a political affair. As Emma Spary writes, the classifications used by naturalists "slipped between the natural world and the social In this way natural history spread many of the scientific developments of the time, but also provided a new source of legitimacy for the dominant class.
The first scientific and literary journals were established during the Enlightenment. However, it was not until that periodicals began to be more widely produced. French and Latin were the dominant languages of publication, but there was also a steady demand for material in German and Dutch. There was generally low demand for English publications on the Continent, which was echoed by England's similar lack of desire for French works.
Languages commanding less of an international market—such as Danish, Spanish and Portuguese—found journal success more difficult and more often than not a more international language was used instead. French slowly took over Latin's status as the lingua franca of learned circles. This in turn gave precedence to the publishing industry in Holland, where the vast majority of these French language periodicals were produced.
Jonathan Israel called the journals the most influential cultural innovation of European intellectual culture. Being a source of knowledge derived from science and reason, they were an implicit critique of existing notions of universal truth monopolized by monarchies, parliaments and religious authorities. They also advanced Christian enlightenment that upheld "the legitimacy of God-ordained authority"—the Bible—in which there had to be agreement between the biblical and natural theories.
Although the existence of dictionaries and encyclopedias spanned into ancient times, the texts changed from simply defining words in a long running list to far more detailed discussions of those words in 18th-century encyclopedic dictionaries. As the 18th century progressed, the content of encyclopedias also changed according to readers' tastes.
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Volumes tended to focus more strongly on secular affairs, particularly science and technology, rather than matters of theology. Along with secular matters, readers also favoured an alphabetical ordering scheme over cumbersome works arranged along thematic lines. For Porset, the avoidance of thematic and hierarchical systems thus allows free interpretation of the works and becomes an example of egalitarianism. The first technical dictionary was drafted by John Harris and entitled Lexicon Technicum: Harris' book avoided theological and biographical entries and instead it concentrated on science and technology.
Published in , the Lexicon technicum was the first book to be written in English that took a methodical approach to describing mathematics and commercial arithmetic along with the physical sciences and navigation. Other technical dictionaries followed Harris' model, including Ephraim Chambers ' Cyclopaedia , which included five editions and was a substantially larger work than Harris'.
The folio edition of the work even included foldout engravings. The Cyclopaedia emphasized Newtonian theories, Lockean philosophy and contained thorough examinations of technologies, such as engraving , brewing and dyeing. In Germany, practical reference works intended for the uneducated majority became popular in the 18th century. The Marperger Curieuses Natur-, Kunst-, Berg-, Gewerkund Handlungs-Lexicon explained terms that usefully described the trades and scientific and commercial education.
Jablonksi Allgemeines Lexicon was better known than the Handlungs-Lexicon and underscored technical subjects rather than scientific theory. For example, over five columns of text were dedicated to wine while geometry and logic were allocated only twenty-two and seventeen lines, respectively. However, the prime example of reference works that systematized scientific knowledge in the age of Enlightenment were universal encyclopedias rather than technical dictionaries. It was the goal of universal encyclopedias to record all human knowledge in a comprehensive reference work.
The work, which began publication in , was composed of thirty-five volumes and over 71 separate entries. A great number of the entries were dedicated to describing the sciences and crafts in detail and provided intellectuals across Europe with a high-quality survey of human knowledge. In d'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot , the work's goal to record the extent of human knowledge in the arts and sciences is outlined:. As a Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Trades, it is to contain the general principles that form the basis of each science and each art, liberal or mechanical, and the most essential facts that make up the body and substance of each.
The massive work was arranged according to a "tree of knowledge". The tree reflected the marked division between the arts and sciences, which was largely a result of the rise of empiricism. Both areas of knowledge were united by philosophy, or the trunk of the tree of knowledge.
The Enlightenment's desacrilization of religion was pronounced in the tree's design, particularly where theology accounted for a peripheral branch, with black magic as a close neighbour. One of the most important developments that the Enlightenment era brought to the discipline of science was its popularization.
An increasingly literate population seeking knowledge and education in both the arts and the sciences drove the expansion of print culture and the dissemination of scientific learning. The new literate population was due to a high rise in the availability of food. This enabled many people to rise out of poverty, and instead of paying more for food, they had money for education. Sir Isaac Newton's celebrated Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was published in Latin and remained inaccessible to readers without education in the classics until Enlightenment writers began to translate and analyze the text in the vernacular.
The first significant work that expressed scientific theory and knowledge expressly for the laity, in the vernacular and with the entertainment of readers in mind, was Bernard de Fontenelle 's Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds The book was produced specifically for women with an interest in scientific writing and inspired a variety of similar works.
Charles Leadbetter's Astronomy was advertised as "a Work entirely New" that would include "short and easie [ sic ] Rules and Astronomical Tables". A similar introduction to Newtonianism for women was produced by Henry Pemberton. Extant records of subscribers show that women from a wide range of social standings purchased the book, indicating the growing number of scientifically inclined female readers among the middling class. Sarah Trimmer wrote a successful natural history textbook for children titled The Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature , which was published for many years after in eleven editions.
Most work on the Enlightenment emphasizes the ideals discussed by intellectuals, rather than the actual state of education at the time. Leading educational theorists like England's John Locke and Switzerland's Jean Jacques Rousseau both emphasized the importance of shaping young minds early. By the late Enlightenment, there was a rising demand for a more universal approach to education, particularly after the American and French Revolutions.
The predominant educational psychology from the s onward, especially in northern European countries was associationism, the notion that the mind associates or dissociates ideas through repeated routines. In addition to being conducive to Enlightenment ideologies of liberty, self-determination and personal responsibility, it offered a practical theory of the mind that allowed teachers to transform longstanding forms of print and manuscript culture into effective graphic tools of learning for the lower and middle orders of society.
These universities, especially Edinburgh, produced professors whose ideas had a significant impact on Britain's North American colonies and later the American Republic. Within the natural sciences, Edinburgh's medical school also led the way in chemistry, anatomy and pharmacology. In France, the major exception was the medical university at Montpellier. The history of Academies in France during the Enlightenment begins with the Academy of Science , founded in in Paris.
It was closely tied to the French state, acting as an extension of a government seriously lacking in scientists. It helped promote and organize new disciplines and it trained new scientists. It also contributed to the enhancement of scientists' social status, considering them to be the "most useful of all citizens". Academies demonstrate the rising interest in science along with its increasing secularization, as evidenced by the small number of clerics who were members 13 percent. They perceived themselves as "interpreters of the sciences for the people".
For example, it was with this in mind that academicians took it upon themselves to disprove the popular pseudo-science of mesmerism. These academic contests were perhaps the most public of any institution during the Enlightenment. However, by roughly this subject matter had radically expanded and diversified, including "royal propaganda, philosophical battles, and critical ruminations on the social and political institutions of the Old Regime".
Topics of public controversy were also discussed such as the theories of Newton and Descartes, the slave trade, women's education and justice in France. More importantly, the contests were open to all and the enforced anonymity of each submission guaranteed that neither gender nor social rank would determine the judging. Indeed, although the "vast majority" of participants belonged to the wealthier strata of society "the liberal arts, the clergy, the judiciary and the medical profession" , there were some cases of the popular classes submitting essays and even winning.
Of a total of 2, prize competitions offered in France, women won 49—perhaps a small number by modern standards, but very significant in an age in which most women did not have any academic training. Product details File Size: Editions Gallimard March 1, Publication Date: March 1, Sold by: Not Enabled Screen Reader: Enabled Amazon Best Sellers Rank: Share your thoughts with other customers.
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