enlightenment the intellectual revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries
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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.”