Changes

Part of the central thrust of Enlightenment thought was the idea of the essential nature of man. It was thought that if knowledge could be possessed, if society could be imagined, then man stood at the core of that achievement. Previous to this moment in Western conceptions of society, knowledge was considered the preserve of the Divine. Enlightenment presaged a secular authority for knowing. Knowledge was the way that humans could encounter reality. The logical extension of these notions was that whatever needed to be could be known and that reality could be measured.

This mode of inquiry was never to be pursued solely for its own sake. Knowledge of the world was organized with the objective of ordering society. Out of the logic of Enlightenment thinking emerged political orders. The most well-known of these was the enlightened despotism of the Prussian state. But it was not limited to the Germanies. The modern nation-state, is thus, an Enlightenment-inspired creation. For many, it was not until the “age of revolution” that light of Enlightenment was first shown. This reading suggests that it was the flowering of these new ideas that inspired and created the space for self-government, for democracy. In this reading, the American Revolution, rather than the French, was Enlightenment’s crowning achievement.