What were the main characteristics of the Enlightenment?

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Date 24.11.2000                            Course title: Sociology

Surname: Manesi                                    

Forename: Sofia                                    Course code: SO 300

                                 

                                 

Essay No1

Essay title:

What were the main characteristics of the Enlightenment?

This essay is going to discuss the main characteristics of the most important event that took place during the 18th century, Enlightenment (1715 - 1799). However, before my analysis of its main characteristics begins, it would be helpful making a small review of how things were in society before the start of this movement.

Until the 18th century, just before the Enlightenment era started, people’s knowledge was really limited. The only information they had about world nature and society, human creation and about people’s place, duties and destiny in the world, was from what the Christian Church was popularising through the Bible and many other religious scripts. The Bible and the several religious scripts were transmitted in religious institutes, colleges, schools, and churches. Obviously, the Christendom in combination to the monarchs was the ruler of the epoch. People strictly leant on tradition, and had total faith in religion. The clergy had managed to make them believe that there was no way of improvement and that they should blindly trust the Church. Consequently, commonalty could not understand the ideas and the expectations for any different in the future. In the pre-Enlightenment era it could not be tolerated for people of different classes to mix. The whole of humanity was faithful in old traditions and everybody thought that the future was already written and was therefore unchangeable; as there was an inborn notion of stability.

However at the end of the 18th century the Enlightenment came to create many important changes in the whole structure of human life, by rejecting almost all-traditional beliefs, which had existed in the previous epoch. The era of Enlightenment is placed between the death of Louis XIV (king of France) and the coup d’ètat of the 18th Brumaire, which took place on the 9th November 1799. Enlightenment started in France as a result of the stagnant atmosphere that the French monarchical authorities and the clergy had created. French people felt a lack of freedom and therefore Enlightenment rapidly gained many intellectual, significant and heartfelt supporters, as its main characteristics of individualism, progress and change were exactly what people needed at that particular time.

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Individualism - during the Enlightenment a doctrine was formed, which argued that only individual things exist, therefore classes and property did not have reality. This doctrine became the foundation for the development of a really important notion, the notion of individualism. A definition for individualism could be that it is the concept according to which every single human being is the beginning for a whole wealth of knowledge and action that an individual could possess. In addition, it is not possible for individuals to think at a higher level. According to this notion, society is just a collection of individuals who ...

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