User:Samantha M Kennedy/sandbox

Like the French Revolution, the Enlightenment has long been hailed as the foundation of modern Western political and intellectual culture.[174] It has been frequently linked to the French Revolution of 1789. However, as Roger Chartier points out, it was perhaps the Revolution that "invented the Enlightenment by attempting to root its legitimacy in a corpus of texts and founding authors reconciled and united ... by their preparation of a rupture with the old world".[175]

In other words, the revolutionaries elevated to heroic status those philosophers, such as Voltaire and Rousseau, who could be used to justify their radical break with the Ancien Régime. In any case, two 19th-century historians of the Enlightenment, Hippolyte Taine and Alexis de Tocqueville, did much to solidify this link of Enlightenment causing revolution and the intellectual perception of the Enlightenment itself.

As an alternative perspective to revolutionaries using the works of philosophers such as Voltaire and Rousseau as excuses and justifications for engaging in revolution is the more plausible perspective that the Government Philosophy of "Consent of the Governed" as delineated by Locke in Two Treatises of Government (1689) represented a paradigm shift from the old Governance Paradigm under Feudalism known as the "Divine Right of Kings" The more correct perspective of what caused the revolutions of from the late 1700s to the early 1800s was this governance paradigm shift that often could not be resolved peacefully and therefore, violent revolution was the result. Clearly a Governance philosophy where the king was never wrong was in direct conflict with a Governance Philosophy where by Citizens by Natural Law had to consent to the acts and rulings of their government[CynicalPatriot]

John Locke was able to root his governance philosophy, in social contract theory, a predominant subject that permeated Enlightenment political thought. Formally, it was the English Philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, who ushered in this new debate with his work Leviathan in 1651. Both John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau developed their own social contract theories within Two Treatises of Government and The Social Contract respectively. While quite different works, all three authors argue that a social contract is necessary for man to live in civil society.

For Thomas Hobbes, the state of nature is a state of war. Hobbes presupposes that "the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” therefore to live in the state of nature is to live in fear and insecurity at all times. To end this ever-present fear, Hobbes argues society enters into a social contract with an all-powerful, absolute leader--a Leviathan--giving up a few personal liberties in exchange for security and lawfulness.

In 1689, John Locke publishes his work, Two Treatises of Government, in which Locke configures his state of nature as a place where humans are rational and follow natural law, in which every man is born equal and with the right to life, liberty and property. However, when one breaks the Law of Nature, both the transgressor and the victim enter into a state of war, in which it is virtually impossible to break free from. Therefore, Locke argues that individuals enter into civil society to protect their natural rights via an “unbiased judge” or common authority, such as courts, to appeal to.

Contrastingly, Rousseau’s conception of both the state of nature and civil society, and how man moves from one to the other, relies on the supposition that civil man is corrupted. In his work Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau argues natural man is sentient being that has no want he cannot fulfill himself. Natural man is only taken out of the state of nature when “the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine, and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society." Once inequality associated with private property is established, society is corrupted and thusly perpetuates inequality through the division of labor and, ultimately, power relations. With this in mind, Rousseau wrote On the Social Contract to spell out his contract theory. He argues that men join into civil society via the social contract to achieve unity while preserving individual freedom, this is embodied in the sovereignty of the general will, the moral and collective legislative body constituted by citizens.

Though much of Enlightenment political thought was dominated by social contract theorists, both David Hume and Adam Ferguson criticized this camp. In his essay, "Of the Original Contract," Hume argues that governments derived from consent are rarely seen, rather civil government is grounded in a ruler's habitual authority and force. It is precisely because of the ruler's authority over-and-against the subject, that the subject tacitly consents; Hume argues, the subject would "never imagine that their consent made him sovereign," rather the authority did so. Similarly, Ferguson did not believe citizens built the state, rather polies grew out of social development. In his 1767 An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Ferguson uses the four stages of progress, a theory that was very popular in Scotland at the time, to explain how humans advance from a hunting and gathering society to a commercial and civil society without "signing" a social contract.

Both Rousseau and Locke's social contract theories rest on the presupposition of natural rights. A natural right is not given to man by law or custom, rather something that all men have in pre-political societies, and are therefore universal and inalienable. The most famous natural right formulation comes from John Locke in his Second Treatise, when he introduces the state of nature. As previously discussed, man is perfectly free in the state of nature, within the bounds of the law of nature and reason. For Locke the law of nature is grounded on mutual security, or the idea that one cannot infringe on another's natural rights, as every man is equal and has the same inalienable rights. These natural rights include perfect equality and freedom, and the right to preserve life and property.

Based on his formulation, John Locke argued against slavery on the basis that enslaving yourself goes against the law of nature; you cannot surrender your own rights, your freedom is absolute and one cannot take it from you. Additionally, Locke argues that one cannot enslave another because it is morally reprehensible. Locke does introduce a caveat in his indictment of slavery, he believes one can be made a slave during times of war and conflict because this is merely a continuation of the state of war. Therefore, one cannot sell themselves into slavery, but if one were to find himself a lawful captive, his enslavement would not go against his natural rights.

Locke's theory on natural rights has influenced many political documents including the French National Constituent Assembly's the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the United States' Declaration of Independence, to name a few.

In his l Régime (1876), Hippolyte Taine traced the roots of the French Revolution back to French Classicism. However, this was not without the help of the scientific view of the world [of the Enlightenment], which wore down the "monarchical and religious dogma of the old regime".[176] In other words then, Taine was only interested in the Enlightenment insofar as it advanced scientific discourse and transmitted what he perceived to be the intellectual legacy of French classicism.

Alexis de Tocqueville painted a more elaborate picture of the Enlightenment in L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1850). For de Tocqueville, the Revolution was the inevitable result of the radical opposition created in the 18th century between the monarchy and the men of letters of the Enlightenment. These men of letters constituted a sort of "substitute aristocracy that was both all-powerful and without real power". This illusory power came from the rise of "public opinion", born when absolutist centralization removed the nobility and the bourgeoisie from the political sphere. The "literary politics" that resulted promoted a discourse of equality and was hence in fundamental opposition to the monarchical regime.[177]

De Tocqueville "clearly designates ... the cultural effects of transformation in the forms of the exercise of power".[178] Nevertheless, it took another century before cultural approach became central to the historiography, as typified by Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (1979).

De Dijn argues that Peter Gay, in The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966), first formulated the interpretation that the Enlightenment brought political modernization to the West, in terms of introducing democratic values and institutions and the creation of modern, liberal democracies. While the thesis has many critics it has been widely accepted by Anglophone scholars and has been reinforced by the large-scale studies by Robert Darnton, Roy Porter and most recently by Jonathan Israel.[179]