where can i find alot of facts on the age of enlightment?

Question

its for my history project due fri. any links ?

Answer 1

is the anything specific you want to find about the age of enlightment? there's four links to websites about the Age of Enlightment but if you need any more info, just yahoo or google Age of Enlightment and you'll have a lot of info at your fingertips.

Answer 2

This might help.

mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc2/lectures/enlightenment.html

some of what is included in piece:

We can call the eighteenth century the age of the enlightenment bcause it was both a culmination and a new beginning. Fresh currents of thought were wearing down institutionalized traditions. New ideas and new approaches to old institutions were setting the stage for great revolutions to come.


I. Social Milieu
The main figures of the enlightenment are fairly well known: Descartes, Pascal, Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. There were others whom we could call antagonists to the dominant note, people like Rousseau, Zinzendorf, Wesley, Vico, and Hume. The pervasive appeal, as expressed by Voltaire, was to the


1. autonomy of reason
2. perfectibility and progress
3. confidence in the ability to discover causality
4. principles governing nature, man and society
5. assault on authority
6. cosmopolitan solidarity of enlightened intellectuals
7. disgust with nationalism.
These enlightened philosophes made extravagant claims, but there was more to them than merely negations and disinfectants. It was primarily a French movement because French culture dominated Europe and because their ideas were expressed in the environment of the Parisian salon. Therefore, it was basically a middle-class movement. They, nevertheless labored for man in general, for humanity.

Clearly the feudal edifice was crumbling, but there was no real antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy as yet. One can detect the bourgeoisie struggling for freedom from state regulations and for liberty of commercial activity. It is also evident that a wave of prosperity brought a greater degree of self-confidence to the bourgeoisie. Great fortunes were made every town. Mercantilism was loosening its hold on the economy. By 1750 the reading public came into existence because of increasing literacy. Yet the philosophes lived a precarious life. They never knew whether they would be imprisoned or courted. Yet they assumed the air of an army on the march.