1. 5HUM0271 Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Lecture 6: The Enlightenment

2. What do historians mean by ‘The Enlightenment’?
Old view:
rationality rather than superstition or revelation
A world view validated by science rather than religion or tradition
a belief in the power of human reason to change society and liberate the individual from the restraints of custom or arbitrary authority

3. European philosophers
L to R:
Montesquieu ( )
Voltaire ( )
Kant ( )
Diderot ( )

4. What do historians mean by ‘the Enlightenment’?
Newer interpretations:
no longer an autonomous intellectual movement
not confined to western Europe
no single chronology or extent of spread or influence
Interest in how society disseminated, used and responded to ideas

5. Key theme
‘It is more helpful to think of Enlightenment as a series of problems and debates, of ‘flash-points’, characteristic of the eighteenth century, or of ‘pockets’ where projects of intellectual expansion impacted upon and changed the nature of developments in society and government on a world-wide basis.’
Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (1995), p. 3.

6. problems and debates 1. Religion:
Ranges from violent hostility to religion to a promotion of ‘rational Dissent’
Debate on toleration = the connection between religion and the state
2. Science:
Defining boundaries from experimental philosophy
Nature – from part of a ‘Great Chain of Being’ to discrete classification groups

7. Joseph Wright of Derby, ‘A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery,’ 1766

8. Scottish philosophers
L to R:
David Hume ( )
Adam Ferguson ( )
Adam Smith ( )

9. The Spectator (1711-14) editors Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

10. The Lunar Society of Birmingham