Enlightenment

The Intellectual Revolution of the 17th and 18th Centuries

Thomas Hobbes

• Works: Leviathon• Ideas:• People are naturally cruel,

greedy and selfish.• Without strict control people

would fight, oppress, and rob one another.

• Best government is an absolute monarchy.

John Locke• Works: Two Treatises of

Government.• Ideas:• People are reasonable and moral.• Have certain rights to life, liberty

and property.• Best government has limited

power and is accepted by all citizens.

• Government has an obligation to the people…people have the right to revolution.

Baron de Montesquieu• Works: The Spirit of the Laws

• Ideas:• Liked limited monarchy-separate

branches of government-executive, legislative, judicial.

• System of Checks and Balances.• Ideas made way into US

Constitution.• "In republican governments, men are all

equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing."

Voltaire

• Ideas:• Attacked corrupt officials and idle

aristocrats.• Attacked inequality, injustice,

superstition, the slave trade, and deplored religious prejudice.

• Defended freedom of speech.– “I do not agree with a word that you say, but

will defend to the death your right to say it”

– “Those who can make you believe absurditiescan make you commit atrocities”

Denis Diderot

• Works: The Encyclopedia• Ideas:• Wanted to change the general

way of thinking. Used encyclopedia to explain the new ways of thinking on government, philosophy and religion.

• Work did much to shape ideas in Europe and the Americas.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• Works: The Social Contract• Ideas:• People are basically good, but

are corrupted by the evils of society.

• Government is good, give up self interests for the common good.

• Helped to fan the flames of revolution.

Adam Smith

• Works: The Wealth of Nations

• Ideas:• Argued that the free market

should be allowed to operate and regulate business.

• Everything was linked to supply and demand.

• Economy was better off without governmental control.

• “Virtue is more to be feared than vice,because its excesses are not subject tothe regulation of conscience.”