The presence of the French academies in the public sphere cannot be attributed to their membership; although the majority of their members were bourgeois, the exclusive institution was only open to el ...
Most work on the Enlightenment tends to emphasise what intellectuals wrote about what education should be and not about what education actually was during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thi ...
The philosophes spent a great deal of energy disseminating their ideas among educated men and women in cosmopolitan cities. They used many venues, some of them quite new.
Because of the focus on reason over superstition, the Enlightenment cultivated the arts. Emphasis on learning, art and music became more widespread, especially with the growing middle class. Areas of ...
The word "public" implies the highest level of inclusivity – the public sphere by definition should be open to all. However, as the analysis of many "public" institutions of the Enlightenment will sh ...
In opposition to the intellectual historiographical approach of the Enlightenment, which examines the various currents or discourses of intellectual thought within the European context during the 17th ...
Although Enlightenment thinkers generally shared a similar set of values, their philosophical perspectives and methodological approaches to accomplishing their goals varied in significant and sometime ...
The Americans closely followed English and Scottish political ideas, as well as some French thinkers such as Montesquieu. During the Enlightenment there was a great emphasis upon liberty, democracy, r ...
Thomas Hobbes wrote the 1651 book Leviathan, which provided the foundation for social contract theory. Though he was a champion of absolutism for the sovereign, Hobbes also developed some of the funda ...
In the 18th-century, influential thinkers such as Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and David Hume, paved the way for the modernization of Scotland and the entire Atlantic world. Hutcheson, the father of ...
In Ukrainian philosophy stands early stage of the Enlightenment, which occurs in the era of the emergence of capitalism (the first quarter of 18th-century). Socio-economic factors led to its originali ...
Charles III, king of Spain from 1759 to 1788, tried to rescue his empire from decay through far-reaching reforms such as weakening the Church and its monasteries, promoting science and university rese ...
In Russia the Enlightenment of the mid-eighteenth century saw the government begin to actively encourage the proliferation of arts and sciences. This era produced the first Russian university, library ...
By the mid-18th century the German Enlightenment in music, philosophy, science and literature emerged as an intellectual force. Frederick the Great (1712–86), the king of Prussia 1740–1786, saw hims ...
The Age of Enlightenment reached Poland later than in Germany or Austria, as szlachta (nobility) culture (Sarmatism) together with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth political system (Golden Freedoms) ...
