The Age Of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment The Enlightenment was a busy time. Lives were changing, ideas were sprouting, and ink met paper to create some of the most intellectually challenging documents yet. The ideas of this age could be defined as innovative and revolutionary. It was a time of skepticism that caused people to doubt what they were taught, thus creating new ideas of how the world works. This time period began around the middle of the 1700s in Europe, a time and place where many revolutions were happening and people with big ideas had big opportunities that would make an impression on the world around them. Many folks got on the Enlightenment band wagon, though some are more notable than others. People such as Isaac Newton were on the scientific side of this age of reason, while others such as John Locke were on the more philosophical side. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a famous Enlightenment thinker, as well as Thomas Paine and Adam Smith. These men had great influence on society and history. They pushed the boundaries of what was already known and made new discoveries, theories, and world views. …show more content…
Published in January 1776 in Philadelphia, nearly 120,000 copies were in circulation by April.’ (ushistory.org, Thomas Paine's Common Sense) Common Sense touched on the current hot political climate - America’s independence from England and the creation of a democratic republic. Paine also wrote The Age of Reason and Rights of Man, which focused on religion and political revolutions, respectively. Other authors wrote about their ideas, too. John Locke wrote An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which spoke of the foundations of human knowledge. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations tackled the subject of countries