Lecture 19
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
1. Traditional Views of the Enlightenment
French philosophes - Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau. One of its great products was the Encyclopedie of Diderot and D=Alembert
the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant in 1783 in his essay What is Enlightenment?
-motto of the Enlightenment: dare to know
key tenents of such an Enlightenment were reason before faith, the progress of society and the benefit of humanity.
2. Widening of Definitions
-many more countries
Roy Porter's Enlightenments in National Context
-a wide aspect of ideas and culture in the 18thC - political economy to music; politeness and manners to grub street journalism
base line definitions - Roy Porter-there is not much that is left out.
3. Central English Contributions to the Enlightenment
1. The critique of radical religion
Latitudinarianism
Arminiansim
Socinianism
Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Toland
2. Scientific background
Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687)
Locke's Essay on Human Understanding (1689/90)
Experience, education and gender
3. Moral Philosophy
Shaftesbury - benevolence and sociability
Politeness - Addison and Steele - The Tatler and The Spectator
The Public Sphere and the Enlightenment
Jurgen Habermas - >the public= and the >private= spheres
The middling class and the formation of public opinion
4. English and Continental Divergence
Canonical thinkers not in England
Perry Anderson and EP Thompson
Porter's critique
England as a model
Continental intelligentsia
Did the English need and Enlightenment?
The 1790s - Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft
5. The Case of Scotland
David Hume and William Robertson, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart, Lord Kames and Hugh Blair - and the scientist, Joseph Black - leading Enlightenment writers read and translated all over Europe
- key concern of their writing - the betterment of the human condition in this world regardless of what might be supposed to happen in the next
-political economy, conjectural history, progress of society
What did the English miss out on?
6. Science and Technology
Newtonian Mechanics
Margaret Jacob in Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West
-scientific culture and >mental capital=of the industrial revolution
-The Knowledge Economy
-An Industrial Enlightenment? - Joel Mokyr
John Smeaton, James Watt, John Rennie and Richard Trevithick - cultural foundations of steam technology.