Asher, Period 3, Team 3, Enlightenment Synthesis

The Restoration era, or the era of Enlightenment, was an expansion of the Renaissance, namely, the proliferation of knowledge due to the printing press and the challenges to the corruption of the church. During this era, there were many great philosophers and “great-thinkers” who ridiculed their society at the time in their own way. All of these philosophers were able to mock their society through their books due the invention of the printing press, thus the spreading of their ideology quickened. Who would read these books? The growing middle class would of course, and they would be the educators who would then pass on this knowledge to the lower class. This massive expansion of the middle class during the era meant there was an expansion of the educated and intellectuals. The availability of knowledge to people led to more insightful literature, which led to more knowledge. They read about the insufficiency of their current form of government through philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Charles Montesquieu. Thomas Hobbes felt that having a systematic government was too inadequate and that a single ruler to rule all would be idealistic. His was known simply as the Leviathan, which derived from the biblical Leviathan, talked about how the idea of many sovereign nations could not peacefully exist and will result in constant chaos and warfare due to these nations’ differences in ideology ad belief. So the idea of the Leviathan is that all these sovereign nations would unite as one under a single ruler. Now on the other end of this political ideology spectrum was John Locke and Charles Montesquieu, who both believed in a systematic government. John Locke more or less ridiculed that society at the time lacked individual liberties, which are natural rights given to people by God at birth. His ideas on freedom were so strong that he is referred to as the Father of Liberalism, and he would greatly influence future and upcoming revolutions. He pushed the concepts of personal liberty, religious tolerance, and protection of property. As for Charles Montesquieu, he preached his philosophy of “branched government”, which stated that separating government into branches would create a system of checks and balances. Little did these philosophers know that their mockeries of society would greatly change the world over the next two or three centuries.

Jimmy Don
Haseeb Khan
Yerin Kong
Erik Seetao
Christina Yang