Similarly to Hobbes, he assumed that the sole right to defend in the state of nature was not enough, so people established a civil society to resolve conflicts in a civil way with help from government in a state of society. However, Locke never refers to Hobbes by name and may instead have been responding to other writers of the day.
He also advocated governmental separation of powers, and believed that revolution is not only a right but an obligation in some circumstances. These ideas would come to have profound influence on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
However, Locke did not demand a republic. Rather, he believed a legitimate contract could easily exist between citizens and a monarchy, an oligarchy, or in some mixed form. He defines the state of nature as a condition, in which humans are rational and follow natural law, and in which all men are born equal with the right to life, liberty and property.
However, when one citizen breaks the Law of Nature, both the transgressor and the victim enter into a state of war, from which it is virtually impossible to break free. However, historians also note that Locke was a major investor in the English slave-trade through the Royal African Company.
In addition, he participated in drafting the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina , which established a feudal aristocracy and gave a master absolute power over his slaves.
Because of his opposition to aristocracy and slavery in his major writings, some historians accuse Locke of hypocrisy and racism, and point out that his idea of liberty is reserved to Europeans or even the European capitalist class only. Montesquieu was a French political philosopher of the Enlightenment period, whose articulation of the theory of separation of powers is implemented in many constitutions throughout the world.
Baron de Montesquieu, usually referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French lawyer, man of letters, and one of the most influential political philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment. He was born in France in After losing both parents at an early age, he became a ward of his uncle, the Baron de Montesquieu.
He became a counselor of the Bordeaux Parliament in A year later, he married Jeanne de Lartigue, a Protestant, who bore him three children. England had declared itself a constitutional monarchy in the wake of its Glorious Revolution , and had joined with Scotland in the Union of to form the Kingdom of Great Britain.
These national transformations had a great impact on Montesquieu, who would refer to them repeatedly in his work. Montesquieu withdrew from the practice of law to devote himself to study and writing. Besides writing works on society and politics, Montesquieu traveled for a number of years through Europe, including Austria and Hungary, spending a year in Italy and 18 months in England, where he became a freemason before resettling in France.
He was troubled by poor eyesight and was completely blind by the time he died from a high fever in Montesquieu, portrait by an unknown artist, c.
The Spirit of Laws The Spirit of the Laws is a treatise on political theory first published anonymously by Montesquieu in In , Thomas Nugent published the first English translation. Montesquieu spent around 21 years researching and writing The Spirit of the Laws , covering many things, including the law, social life, and the study of anthropology, and providing more than 3, commendations.
In this political treatise, Montesquieu pleaded in favor of a constitutional system of government and the separation of powers, the ending of slavery, the preservation of civil liberties and the law, and the idea that political institutions should reflect the social and geographical aspects of each community. Montesquieu defines three main political systems: republican, monarchical, and despotic.
As he defines them, republican political systems vary depending on how broadly they extend citizenship rights—those that extend citizenship relatively broadly are termed democratic republics, while those that restrict citizenship more narrowly are termed aristocratic republics. The distinction between monarchy and despotism hinges on whether or not a fixed set of laws exists that can restrain the authority of the ruler.
If so, the regime counts as a monarchy. If not, it counts as despotism. A second major theme in The Spirit of Laws concerns political liberty and the best means of preserving it. He distinguishes this view of liberty from two other, misleading views of political liberty. The first is the view that liberty consists in collective self-government i.
The second is the view that liberty consists of being able to do whatever one wants without constraint. Political liberty is not possible in a despotic political system, but it is possible, though not guaranteed, in republics and monarchies.
Generally speaking, establishing political liberty requires two things: the separation of the powers of government, and the appropriate framing of civil and criminal laws so as to ensure personal security. Montesquieu based this model on the Constitution of the Roman Republic and the British constitutional system. He took the view that the Roman Republic had powers separated so that no one could usurp complete power.
In the British constitutional system, Montesquieu discerned a separation of powers among the monarch, Parliament, and the courts of law. He also notes that liberty cannot be secure where there is no separation of powers, even in a republic.
Pursuant to this requirement to frame civil and criminal laws appropriately to ensure political liberty, Montesquieu also argues against slavery and for the freedom of thought, speech, and assembly. Voltaire was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher, who attacked the Catholic Church and advocated freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state.
By the time he left school, Voltaire had decided he wanted to be a writer, against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to become a lawyer. In , his father obtained a job for him as a secretary to a French ambassador in the Netherlands, but Voltaire was forced to return to France after a scandalous affair. From early on, he had trouble with the authorities over his critiques of the government. These activities were to result in two imprisonments and a temporary exile to England.
He mainly argued for religious tolerance and freedom of thought. Voltaire was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works.
He wrote more than 20, letters and more than 2, books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken advocate of several liberties, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day.
Most of his prose, including such genres as romance, drama, or satire, was written as polemics with the goal of conveying radical political and philosophical messages.
The book was quickly banned. Only a year later, he published The Philosophical Dictionary — an encyclopedic dictionary with alphabetically arranged articles that criticize the Roman Catholic Church and other institutions. In it, Voltaire is concerned with the injustices of the Catholic Church, which he sees as intolerant and fanatical.
At the same time, he espouses deism, tolerance, and freedom of the press. It represents the culmination of his views on Christianity, God, morality, and other subjects. Voltaire had an enormous influence on the development of historiography through his demonstration of fresh new ways to look at the past.
Voltaire broke from the tradition of narrating diplomatic and military events, and emphasized customs, social history, and achievements in the arts and sciences. The Essay traced the progress of world civilization in a universal context, thereby rejecting both nationalism and the traditional Christian frame of reference. Voltaire was also the first scholar to make a serious attempt to write the history of the world, eliminating theological frameworks and emphasizing economics, culture, and political history.
He treated Europe as a whole, rather than a collection of nations. He was the first to emphasize the debt of medieval culture to Middle Eastern civilization, and consistently exposed the intolerance and frauds of the church over the ages. In his criticism of the French society and existing social structures, Voltaire hardly spared anyone. He perceived the French bourgeoisie to be too small and ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the commoners as ignorant and superstitious, and the church as a static and oppressive force useful only on occasion as a counterbalance to the rapacity of kings, although all too often, even more rapacious itself.
Voltaire distrusted democracy, which he saw as propagating the idiocy of the masses. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Francophone Genevan philosopher and writer, whose conceptualization of social contract, the theory of natural human, and works on education greatly influenced the political, philosophical, and social western tradition.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Francophone Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the Enlightenment in France and across Europe. It was also important to the French Revolution and the overall development of modern political and educational thought. Rousseau was born in in Geneva, which was at the time a city-state and a Protestant associate of the Swiss Confederacy.
His mother died several days after he was born, and after his father remarried a few years later, Jean-Jacques was left with his maternal uncle, who packed him away, along with his own son, to board for two years with a Calvinist minister in a hamlet outside Geneva. Here, the boys picked up the elements of mathematics and drawing.
After his father and uncle had more or less disowned him, the teenage Rousseau supported himself for a time as a servant, secretary, and tutor, wandering in Italy and France. He had been an indifferent student, but during his 20s, which were marked by long bouts of hypochondria, he applied himself to the study of philosophy, mathematics, and music.
Rousseau spent his adulthood holding numerous administrative positions and moving across Europe, often to escape a controversy caused by his radical writings. His relationships with various women had important impacts on his life choices e. Rousseau died in In common with other philosophers of the day, Rousseau looked to a hypothetical state of nature as a normative guide.
In his Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences , Rousseau argued, in opposition to the dominant stand of Enlightenment thinkers, that the arts and sciences corrupt human morality. The Social Contract outlines the basis for a legitimate political order within a framework of classical republicanism. Published in , it became one of the most influential works of political philosophy in the western tradition. Rousseau claimed that the state of nature was a primitive condition without law or morality, which human beings left for the benefits and necessity of cooperation.
As society developed, division of labor and private property required the human race to adopt institutions of law. According to Rousseau, by joining together into civil society through the social contract, and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free. This is because submission to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others, and also ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the authors of the law.
The idea of general will denoted the will of the people as a whole. Although Rousseau argues that sovereignty or the power to make the laws should be in the hands of the people, he also makes a sharp distinction between the sovereign and the government.
He posits that the political aspects of a society should be divided into two parts. First, there must be a sovereign consisting of the whole population, women included, that represents the general will and is the legislative power within the state. The second division is that of the government, being distinct from the sovereign. This division is necessary because the sovereign cannot deal with particular matters like applications of the law.
Locke was one of the first great thinkers about human nature from a purely naturalistic standpoint in modern times. This idea of human nature implies a certain equality among people, at least in origins, and also a belief in progress. We all start out from zero, and we learn more and get better from there.
We are not destined to be what we must be. We are made, and can presumably improve ourselves. In the 18th century, scientific inquiry became a desirable alternative to Christianity as well as social and political customs generally. Christianity was itself greatly changed; many 18th-century theologians sought out more rational expressions of Christian faith, while an entirely new form of Christianity --evangelicalism--emerged as another solution to the problems of faith.
Another important source of the Enlightenment is the material advance of Europeans, particularly the new middle classes. Since the Renaissance in the 15th century, and the discovery of the new world, the growing affluence of Europeans coincided with a growing worldliness of spirit.
Much of the enthusiasm for science was caused by the expectation of material improvements and higher living standards. The eighteenth century witnessed the beginnings of a true economic revolution and a significant growth in the middle classes.
The Enlightenment was a movement of ideas. In practical terms, it existed in two ways: in the printed word, and in the salons literally "living rooms" of wealthy enthusiasts. Your book describes the famous salon of Madame Geoffrin, and there is a painting of it on p. In the social life of the Enlightenment, women were prominent as hosts as sometimes as authors. Indeed, the idea of the equality of women and men originates with the Enlightenment, and particularly with the Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft, who first gave a systematic statement of women's equality in [A year earlier, a Frenchwoman named Olympe de Gouges published a "Declaration of the Rights of Woman" in imitation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man during the French Revolution] Many philosophers of the time did not think that women were equal to men, but it is the natural outcome of the trend of Enlightenment thought since Locke.
If people are blank slates, and not created to fulfill a certain destiny, then can one not assume women are equal to men? If reason, rather than physical force, is the true essence of humanity, then are not women and men equal in this most important respect?
As Wollstonecraft says, men should be content with "rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience" from women, and both sides would be happier. While salons were an important means of spreading the Enlightenment, printed pamphlets, newspapers and books like Wollstonecraft's were much more so. Here again, the material progress of the middle classes in Europe is important. More Europeans were literate, and had the time and money to be readers, and they were eager to improve themselves and their position in life through learning.
There was in the eighteenth century a large and rapidly growing reading public. The idea of a "public opinion" was born and was clearly a great and growing power in human events. The philosophers of the Enlightenment deliberately set about to shape public opinion, and Enlightenment writers become some of the first popular literary celebrities, admired by many thousands around Europe.
Voltaire was the most popular and adored writer in this time--and he loved it. As far as publications went, the most ambitious one of all was Denis Diderot's Encyclopedia.
Locke studied science and medicine at Oxford University and became a professor there. This event reduced the power of the king and made Parliament the major authority in English government.
In , Locke published his Two Treatises of Government. He generally agreed with Hobbes about the brutality of the state of nature, which required a social contract to assure peace. But he disagreed with Hobbes on two major points. First, Locke argued that natural rights such as life, liberty, and property existed in the state of nature and could never be taken away or even voluntarily given up by individuals. Locke also disagreed with Hobbes about the social contract.
For him, it was not just an agreement among the people, but between them and the sovereign preferably a king. According to Locke, the natural rights of individuals limited the power of the king. The king did not hold absolute power, as Hobbes had said, but acted only to enforce and protect the natural rights of the people. If a sovereign violated these rights, the social contract was broken, and the people had the right to revolt and establish a new government. Although Locke spoke out for freedom of thought, speech, and religion, he believed property to be the most important natural right.
He declared that owners may do whatever they want with their property as long as they do not invade the rights of others. Locke favored a representative government such as the English Parliament, which had a hereditary House of Lords and an elected House of Commons. But he wanted representatives to be only men of property and business. Consequently, only adult male property owners should have the right to vote. Locke was reluctant to allow the propertyless masses of people to participate in government because he believed that they were unfit.
The executive prime minister and courts would be creations of the legislature and under its authority. Montesquieu was born into a noble family and educated in the law. He traveled extensively throughout Europe, including England, where he studied the Parliament. Montesquieu published his greatest work, The Spirit of the Laws , in Unlike Hobbes and Locke, Montesquieu believed that in the state of nature individuals were so fearful that they avoided violence and war.
The need for food, Montesquieu said, caused the timid humans to associate with others and seek to live in a society. Montesquieu did not describe a social contract as such.
But he said that the state of war among individuals and nations led to human laws and government. Montesquieu wrote that the main purpose of government is to maintain law and order, political liberty, and the property of the individual. Montesquieu opposed the absolute monarchy of his home country and favored the English system as the best model of government. Montesquieu somewhat misinterpreted how political power was actually exercised in England. When he wrote The Spirit of the Laws , power was concentrated pretty much in Parliament, the national legislature.
Montesquieu thought he saw a separation and balancing of the powers of government in England. Montesquieu viewed the English king as exercising executive power balanced by the law-making Parliament, which was itself divided into the House of Lords and the House of Commons, each checking the other. Then, the executive and legislative branches were still further balanced by an independent court system. Montesquieu concluded that the best form of government was one in which the legislative, executive, and judicial powers were separate and kept each other in check to prevent any branch from becoming too powerful.
He believed that uniting these powers, as in the monarchy of Louis XIV, would lead to despotism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau — was born in Geneva, Switzerland, where all adult male citizens could vote for a representative government.
Rousseau traveled in France and Italy, educating himself. In , he won an essay contest. His fresh view that man was naturally good and was corrupted by society made him a celebrity in the French salons where artists, scientists, and writers gathered to discuss the latest ideas.
A few years later he published another essay in which he described savages in a state of nature as free, equal, peaceful, and happy. When people began to claim ownership of property, Rousseau argued, inequality, murder, and war resulted. According to Rousseau, the powerful rich stole the land belonging to everyone and fooled the common people into accepting them as rulers. Rousseau concluded that the social contract was not a willing agreement, as Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu had believed, but a fraud against the people committed by the rich.
In , Rousseau published his most important work on political theory, The Social Contract.
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