Civil Society History IV: Enlightenment

Introduction

The Enlightenment represented a rupture in Western civilization. It is often viewed as an epistemological break with the past, in which human beings cast off the yoke of religious cosmology and embraced a new world of science, research, and civility. Historically, the Enlightenment period encompasses the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sociologically, it is synonymous with the emergence of modernity. But it was not simply an epistemological rupture with the past, in which a belief in scientific progress replaced religious verities. The Enlightenment also represented a profound change in human consciousness that produced the American Revolution (1776) and the French Revolution (1789). Absolutism was replaced by republicanism and democracy. Economic liberalism, based upon the free market, was also a product of the Enlightenment. A public sphere emerged in the form of civil society. It was defined by the right to associate freely as citizens as a basic precept of...