what effect did the enlightenment have on political thought in the colonies?

Answer 1

Enlightenment thought was important, but it must be understood in context and in combination with other ideas. The Declaration of Independence, for example, only briefly reflects Enlightenment theory -- much of it stems from OTHER ideas.
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John Locke was the Enlightenment philosopher who most strongly emphasized the political thinking of the American colonists -- mainly through his arguments about "natural rights" and the "social contract" theory of government.

But there is a mistaken popular notion that these Enlightenment ideas were THE central ideas shaping the American revolutionaries. Not to minimize them -- they certainly provided categories and arguments for the revolutionaries. But they certainly did NOT stand alone, and were not necessarily THE most important ideas.

In fact, if you look at the specific ideas and FORMS of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution you will find MUCH that continues long-developing British traditions. For example, language and arguments from the "English Bill of Rights of 1689" are echoed in the Declaration (not too surprising since that document ALSO was a public justification [by Parliament] of rejecting the rule of a British king) as well as in the Bill of Rights later incorporated in the U.S. Constitution.

We find that their ideas about their proper political rights as Englishmen had LONG roots. Locke may have helped them develop SOME of the arguments for the NATURE of these rights and WHY they existed, but the foundations rested on other traditions, and elements of their own (English) history.
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A major source for exploring how all these fit together (which I am currently working my way through)--

A generation ago Bernard Bailyn, preparing a study of the political pamphlets of the period leading up to the Revolution, wrote a long and BRILLIANT essay examining the VARIOUS sources and traditions that came together to shape the thinking expressed in these pamphlets, and later in the key founding documents of the U.S. He later expanded this into a separate book, *The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution* (Harvard University Press, 1967). Bailyn lays out a whole cluster of important traditions, chiefly the following

1) Works from classical antiquity (esp the political history of Rome)
2) Enlightenment ideas on government and natural rights (mainly Locke)
3) Traditions/the history of English Common Law, esp. as expounded by 17th century British authors.
4) Political and social theories of New England Puritanism, esp. ideas associated with covenant theology
5) The radical political and social thought of the English Civil War and Commonwealth period up to the Glorious Revolution -- that is 'opposition' authors of the late 17th and early 18th century

Bailyn argues that source #5 was critical in shaping and bringing together these various (and sometimes conflicting) traditions.

Another good source for studying the roots of the Declaration -- including the FORM it took -- check Paula Maier, *American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence*

You might wish to take a look at the English Bill of Rights see
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/england.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689

Answer 2

Enlightenment Politics

Answer 3

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what effect did the enlightenment have on political thought in the colonies?

Answer 4

John Locke, the English philosopher, and Rousseau, the French philosopher, both from the Age of Enlightenment, contributed many ideas that the colonists used to write the Declaration of Independence and then later the Constitution of the United States. Both favored the common man, expressed the belief that government existed at the will of the governed, and championed human rights for all men.

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Answer 5

Enlightenment writers like John Locke, Thomas Paine, John Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, all had ideas that formed the thinking of powerful colonial members who eventually started the revolution.

Answer 6

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The founding fathers were obviously very effected by the enlightenment philosophers. They failed in many ways to really follow they're philosophies though. the colonies found justification in what the enlightenment philosophers said to try and gain independence. who ever marked me should really read Voltaire and Rousseau before the fact.

Answer 7

The educated and intelligent colonials read the same Enlightenment thinkers that were being read in Europe, but here there was a very great difference: we were without the stifling viciousness of an aristocracy. We had no accepted class of people legally entitled to live on the backs of the masses with a monopoly on government.

Had our original Republican Conservatives gotten their way (Hamilton is a fine example and still one of their idols) the United States would have been a monarchy. They wanted to dig in the monarchical dung heaps of Europe and come up with some royal idler to head up their efforts to bottle up popular government. Failing that, they went for "strong government," which meant using troops to crush Jay's Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, because they revealed the dangerous propensity of "the vile mob" to reject bankers' views of private property or the unwillingness of back country farmers to pay taxes to a distant government in the hands of "Easterners."

But while those men of the right distrusted "the people" we were fortunate enough to have an extraordinary group of truly enlightened leaders, and as the ideas of the Enlightenment were being discusses with the greatest civility in the salons of the Europe, those men acted up the principles of John Locke (Jefferson even quoted him directly in the Declaration of Independence), and when he was asked by a dismayed Conservative of the time, if we have no monarch, who shall judge?, Jefferson stunned the hall with the axiom, "The People Shall Judge."

Although the bankers and industrialists have through their party hawked about "King Jackson," "King Abe" and "King FDR," the danger of tyranny has always been from the right, for whom the basic tenants of the Enlightment have always been a threat. When they speak of liberty, the mean liberty for wealth to act as it will without the restraint of the public interests, they mean freedom to prey upon the people and to exploit them with impunity from regulation.

They are always expecting another Jay's rebellion, and are forever imagining a revolution that will strip them of their property, but the merest familiarity with history instructs us that it is the right who are the advocates of violence and who have had first recourse to the fussilade or the machine gun, or maybe just Henry Ford's thugs beating up and shooting strikers.

The Enlightenment ideals had their greatest effect in the Colonies, but the enemies of those ideals have never died, and they press on today in their unrelenting drive to corrupt and undermine those principles. Presently they are engaged in an effort to create one-party states at the state level by redistricting, disenfranchising minority voters, and breaking unions with "guest workers."

Don't worry, they will fail, and "The People Shall Judge."

Answer 8

individual liberties and private property are the big two; tolerance of religion and separation of church and state are other factors.

Answer 9

is this homework?