Summary+-+Chapter+17+(The+Age+of+Enlightenment)


 * __The Eighteenth Century: An Age of Enlightenment__**

//PS: This is taken STRAIGHT from the study guide.//

Each age builds upon the foundations of its predecessor, and never was this true to a greater degree than the way the eighteenth century built upon the seventeenth. The revolution in science led directly to the Enlightenment and its revolution in social philosophy. The popularization of science, the subsequent growth of a healthy skepticism about tradition, the writings of world travelers, and the legacy of thinkers like John Locke and Isaac Newton brought about an eighteenth cantury flowering of philosophy which is considered one of the high points of Western civilization. The philosophes Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau left a body of writings unsurpassed in the history of social commentary. It was also an age of innovation in the arts. Rococo painting and architecture, classical music, and the birth of the novel form in literature all added style and color to the age. In the social sciences various writers began critically commenting on education, crime and punishement, and the social and economic causes behind historical events. The stage was set for modern scholarship and social criticism. Christianity, which the philosophes blamed for many human woes, found itself in a hostile envirtonment, with the institutional church branded archaic and intellectuals leaving it for what they considered a more respectable deism. Yet among the common people the traditional faith continued to have strong appeal and tenacity. A new era of piety swept both Protestant and Catholic camps; and England particularly experienced a new phenomenon, the popular revival meetings of the Wesleys. Just as the Enlightenment was the product of the Scientific Revolution, so the Enlightenment ushered in the age of political revoution that followed it. It was both the child and the parent of revolution.