One of the most remarkable inventions of the last three to four hundred years was the notion of continual progress, the optimistic assumption that by reason, education, logic and the scientific method, humans can build a better tomorrow, that the future will boast superior knowledge, material goods, scientific advances, technology, medical practices, justice, etc. A historian in 1920 famously called progress “the animating and controlling idea of western civilization.” This unit explores the 18th century political, social, economic and philosophical roots of “The Enlightenment,” the fertile ground on which the idea of progress first took root.

2. Key Question: Ideas of Progress
• Enlightenment thinkers were eager to separate themselves
from what had gone before and to emphasize a firm
commitment to the improvement of the human condition,
without reference to religious injunctions.
• They believed that enhancement of human life was possible
through the application of scientific principles.
• Did their work succeed? Were they misguided in their
approach to ‘progress’?

3. Critiquing the Traditional Way of Life
• The general impoverishment of the peasant majority of
Europe had never been of particular concern to the political
elite.
• It was generally believed impossible—or at least ill-advised—
to improve the physical well-being of those who were lower in
the social order.
• By contrast, a small minority shared the opposite attitude, i.e.
that progress was both possible and desirable, through the
application of human reason to a variety of fields.
• By utilizing an established core of knowledge, they could,
they believed, exceed the accomplishments of all previous
ages.

5. The Philosophes
• The philosophes believed that, by thinking for themselves,
questioning and reflecting, they could understand the world
according to their own rational lights.
• Extending the belief in natural laws that lay at the core of the
Scientific Revolution to the realm of human affairs, they also
claimed that progress was itself a general natural law.
• Seeing themselves as citizens of the world, rather than of their
particular nations, they used exotic traveler’s tales to illustrate
what outsiders might think of (rather absurd) Western
practices and notions.
• Anti-clerical in tone and sympathetic to non-Christian
traditions, these books also demonstrate an awareness of the
larger world.

6. The Project of Systematizing Knowledge…
and its Enemy?
• Efforts to classify, systematize, demonstrate, and
disseminate new knowledge became a central goal of
the Enlightenment.
• The Encyclopedia (with its first volume appearing in
1751) was, according to its editors, designed to
‘contribute to the certitude and progress of human
reason.’
• Aristocratic ‘salons’, or discussion circles, held in
private homes and provincial literary academies, were
also key to the dissemination of knowledge.
• However, the philosophes believed that religious
authorities wished to suppress and impede human
discovery.

7. The Philosophes vs.
Organized Religion
• One of the most bitterly contested issues during the 18th
century was the status of revealed religion and the
power of the church to regulate people’s lives.
• The philosophes equated such power and control with
bigotry and decried intolerance as the root cause of
human divisions.
• ‘Deists’, or ‘Theists’ (as Voltaire defined them),
believed in a God, but one who does not intervene in
the daily affairs of individual believers.
• Spinoza seemed to approach a pantheistic
identification of God with all of nature, and the Baron
d’Holbach concluded that the entire idea of God was a
mere superstition.

8. Applications of Enlightenment Philosophy
to Civil Society
• In Adam Smith’s estimation, society is best served
when individuals are permitted to hold onto their private
gains with a minimum of state interference.
• Removing the heavy hand of government from
economic affairs, he was also convinced, would
improve workers’ ability to negotiate.
• Cesare Beccaria called for the reform of irrational legal
systems and focused on the need to rehabilitate
criminals.
• Law codes, in his estimation, should result in ‘the
greatest happiness of the greatest number’, and not
just the private vengeance of one ruler.

9. Key Question Revisited
• With their suspicion of emotion and intuition, desire for
efficient and orderly government, willingness to subject
every traditional belief to rational examination, and
insistence on disseminating information outside centers
of learning, Enlightened thinkers hoped to contribute to
human progress.
• By applying reason to the many facets of daily life,
people could make significant progress in the real
world.
• How did they translate belief into action?
• Were all of their attempts successful or even desirable?