Western Civilization_ Volume B_ 1300 to 1815 - Jackson J. Spielvogel [272]
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CHAPTER SUMMARY
The eighteenth century was a time of change but also of tradition. The popularization of the ideas of the Scientific Revolution, the impact of travel literature, a new skepticism, and the ideas of Locke and Newton led to what historians call the Age of Enlightenment. Its leading figures were the intellectuals known as philosophes who hoped that they could create a new society by using reason to discover the natural laws that governed it. Like the Christian humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they believed that education could create better human beings and a better human society. Such philosophes as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, Quesnay, Smith, Beccaria, Condorcet, and Rousseau attacked traditional religion as the enemy, advocated religious toleration and freedom of thought, criticized their oppressive societies, and created a new “science of man” in economics, politics, and education. In doing so, the philosophes laid the foundation for a modern worldview based on rationalism and secularism.
Although many of the philosophes continued to hold traditional views about women, female intellectuals like Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft began to argue for the equality of the sexes and the right of women to be educated. The Enlightenment appealed largely to the urban middle classes and some members of the nobility, and its ideas were discussed in salons, coffeehouses, reading clubs, lending libraries, and societies like the Freemasons.
Innovation in the arts also characterized the eighteenth century. The cultural fertility of the age is evident in Rococo painting and architecture; the achievements of Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart in music; the birth of the novel in literature; and new directions in education and historical writing.
Although the philosophes attacked the established Christian churches, many Europeans continued to practice their traditional faith. Moreover, a new wave of piety swept both Catholic and Protestant churches, especially noticeable in Protestant Europe with the advent of Pietism in Germany and John Wesley and Methodism in England.
Thus, despite the secular thought and secular ideas that began to pervade the mental world of the ruling elites, most people in eighteenth-century Europe still lived by seemingly eternal verities and practices—God, religious worship, and farming. The most brilliant architecture and music of the age were religious. And yet the forces of secularization were too strong to stop. In the midst of intellectual change, economic, political, and social transformations of great purport were taking shape and would lead, as we shall see in the next two chapters, to both political and social upheavals and even revolution before the century’s end.
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CHAPTER TIMELINE
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CHAPTER REVIEW
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Upon Reflection
What contributions did Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau make to the Enlightenment? What did they have in common? How did they differ?
What is popular culture, and how was it expressed in the eighteenth century?
What kinds of experiences do you associate with popular religion in the eighteenth century? How do you explain the continuing growth of popular religious devotion?
Key Terms
Enlightenment
skepticism
cultural relativism
philosophes
cosmopolitan
separation of powers
deism
laissez-faire
economic liberalism
Romanticism
feminism
salons
Rococo
Neoclassicism
high culture
popular culture
pogroms
Pietism
Suggestions for Further Reading
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE Surveys of eighteenth-century Europe include I. Woloch, Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York, 1986); M. S. Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 4th ed. (London, 2000); R. Birn, Crisis, Absolutism, Revolution: Europe, 1648–1789, 3rd ed. (Fort Worth, Tex., 2005); and T. C. W. Blanning, ed., The Eighteenth