Historical Antecedents
1300s - Nascent capitalism in trade leads to a new small, but growing, new middle class
between the aristocracy and peasants.
1440 - The printing press with movable type is invented by Johannes Gutenberg.
1440 - 1500 - Renaissance humanism grows in Italy and spreads northward.
1492 - Christopher Columbus discovers the Americas with peoples of vastly different
social and cultural values.
1517 - Martin Luther distributes his 95 theses against the Church of Rome, the
Protestant Reformation begins. Vernacular Bibles will increase literacy.
1543 - Nicolaus Copernicus proposes heliocentrism.
Late 1500s - The French Wars of Religion. Ended with the Edict of Nantes, 1598.
c. 1600 - The telescope is invented. Galileo undermines Aristotelian science of the
medieval scholastics and confirms heliocentricism. The Catholic Church forces
him to recant under threat of torture in 1633. But the credibility of Church authority
regarding the nature of the universe is damaged.
1618 - 1648 - The Thirty Years' War decimates the Holy Roman Empire (today's Germany and beyond).
Several million people die.
Pre-Enlightenment(?) philosophers...
1637 - Rene Descartes publishes the first work of Modern Philosophy, Discourse on the Method.
1651 - Thomas Hobbes publishes Leviathan.
1670 - Baruch Spinoza publishes Theological-Political Treatise anonymously.
1689 - John Locke publishes An Essay on Human Understanding, Two Treatises on Government,
and A Letter Concerning Toleration anonymously.
The European political situation in c. 1700:
Governments:
There were no democratic republics until the United States created the U.S. Constitution in 1787.
Absolute monarchies in France and Spain (the Bourbons), Russia (the Romanovs), Austria and Hungary (the Habsburgs), Sweden (House of Palatinate-Zweibrücken) and Brandenburg-Prussia (the Hohenzollerns).
For five decades beginning in 1718, Sweden was ruled by a four-estate parliament during the Age of Liberty. Absolute rule returned in 1772.
Parliament had gained ascendancy over the English monarchy in 1688, creating a constitutional monarchy with only aristocrats allowed in the House of Lords. England and Scotland formed Great Britain in 1707. Yet, a century later, very few people could vote in early 1800’s Britain – in England and Wales, this was less than 3% of a population of nearly 8 million and in Scotland, only 4,500 out of 2.6 million.
The Dutch Republic (1581 - 1795) was a confederation of seven provinces, the largest and most prosperous being Holland. These states were very independent of one another. The national government, which sat in The Hague, usually administered only foreign issues like war (see Government and politics in the Dutch Republic).
In the 17th century there was more freedom of speech and religion in the Dutch Republic than in any other European country (but these freedoms were not absolute, e.g. atheism was suppressed). By the early 1700s freedom of expression in Great Britain surpassed that of the Dutch Republic.
International Wars during the Enlightenment
European religions:
The Intellectual Environment:
General Education
With few exceptions, before the 17th century, only the upper classes of nobility and the rising middle class were literate. During the 17th and 18th century literacy increased more rapidly in more populated areas and areas where there was mixture of religious schools. The literacy rate in England in the 1640s was around 30 percent for males, rising to 60 percent in the mid-18th century. France was slightly behind England in literacy. Less women could read, but their literacy rates also increased during the Enlightenment.
In 1763, Frederick the Great of Prussia introduced a mandated, tax funded modern education system for boys and girls funded from ages 5 to 13. It had education in reading and writing, and also music (singing) and religious (Christian) education in close corporation with the churches and tried to impose a strict ethos of duty, soberness and discipline. Frederick also created gymnasiums (college preparatory schools) for older children. After a few decades, the Prussian system included specialized teacher training, a national curriculum and standardized tests.
England and France would not institute compulsory public education until the 1870s.
Universities
Although the assault on Medieval scholasticism had begun about a century earlier with Galileo's attack on Aristotelian physics, in the early 17th century scholastics still dominated European universities. None of the pre-Enlightenment philosophers (e.g. Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle, or Locke) had been university professors.
While some Enlightenment philosophers like Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith in Scotland and Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant (in Germany / Prussia) were professors, most Enlightenment philosophers were not university professors either.
"Public Spheres"
Coffee houses, particularly in England and Germany became settings for public conversation on a wide variety of current topics from science to religion to politics. Governments began funding public libraries because books were often too expensive for the average person to buy.
By the time of the American and French Revolutions, political pamphlets (small, unbound, cheap produced publishings) were in wide circulation. Thomas Paine's Common Sense was the most important pamphlet for instigating the American Revolutions. Over 3,000 different pamphlets were published in France in 1788, the year before the French Revolution began.
The French Revolution also saw the development of political clubs. The Jacobin Club was the largest and most influential in the Revolution. It grew to a membership of about half a million people.
Science in the Enlightenment
Review of major points from the Prelude to the Enlightenment course
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