The Essential Enlightenment (Essential Scholars)
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4.6 • 12 Ratings
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Publisher Description
The political ideas that fully came together under the name “liberal” in the early nineteenth century—the ideas we often now refer to as “classical liberalism”—emerged out of major debates and developments from the late 1600s to the late 1700s, part of the broad European intellectual movement of that era that came to be known as “the Enlightenment.”
This volume shows how the Enlightenment and the development of liberal ideas were woven together by looking at three defining figures of the era: Baruch Spinoza (writing in the mid-1600s), the Baron de Montesquieu (mid-1700s) and Immanuel Kant (whose career reached its height in the final two decades of the 1700s). Both Spinoza and Kant were concerned with fundamental philosophical questions about what we could know about God, morality, the nature of the world, and humanity’s place in it. Montesquieu wrote almost nothing about such questions, drawing instead from global history and comparative law.
While the Enlightenment is associated with many things, one of them was the struggle to understand morality and human nature through the use of reason rather than relying on religious authority; another was the attempt to understand political and social orders in ways that would prevent a return to the wars of religion that had divided Europe in the 1500s and the first half of the 1600s. In various ways, Spinoza, Montesquieu, and Kant all argued for religious toleration—for the peaceful coexistence of different organized ways of understanding God within civil governments that didn’t enforce any one of those ways. Their support of freedom of religious thought also made all of them supporters of free inquiry and free speech. The three thinkers likewise shared commitments to the rule of law and to constitutional forms of government that would constrain the discretionary power of any one ruler.
Customer Reviews
Everlasting Treasure
Those essential scholars, thinkers, of the enlightenment demonstrated intellectual reasoning can be as powerful as to counter brutal forces in their period of time. They illustrated a harmonious society and searched for the true, natural way of authority and government. Government, as those scholars defined, is not for tyranny or the strong to rule the weak, but a tool for everyone to govern themselves. The thoughts that were produced by those thinkers from the Enlightenment left the future generations with enormous wealth. However, there is something which I disagree with those scholars. They have categorized passion and emotion into passive things, which are the opposite of active ones such as reasoning and self control. Human can also find causes of their emotions and control their temper actively. Moreover, passion can be an active cause of one’s success.
Spinoza, Montesquieu, and Kant’s work focused on the different forms of government and how the interplays between the governors and the governed differs under those frameworks. For example, Spinoza mentioned proclaims that people are eager to gaining power and authority to rule. Anyone who is in the process of achieving such goal need to counter the force of others in the society who are trying to do the same. This may also apply to the business world. As a company or a product tries to gain market share. They not only have to break the existing order of the current market made of existing firms and products but also need to compete against competitors of their one era and own category. This may also sounds like the core concept of Darwin, which says that only the fittest can survive. Thus, both politics and business can be views as “organic” systems that evolve constantly.