Enlightenment: The Age Of Enlightenment And The Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment is an era of realization that lasted from the 1620s to the 1780s. It occurred in Western Europe and it was during this moment in time that intellectuals began to inspect the principles in which the monarchies governed by. The standards that they enforced during this time held everything together from the government to religion. As the movement expanded more and more people began to think for themselves and the world as they were taught it began to be under examination and scrutiny. There wasn’t just one single epiphany movement in unison, but instead, there were a plethora including the French Enlightenment, and the English, or American Enlightenment. The scholarly thinkers of this time had very different approaches when it came to various perspectives. Locke had oppositions from Hume’s perceptions, Rousseau from Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson from Frederick the Great. Although, they held very diverse stances, a cluster of discoveries and advances emerged out of the common themes of their rational questioning. In order to get a grasp of the whole Enlightenment concept, one must understand how it all started. In the late 16th century through the end of the 17th century there were religious wars between the Catholics and the Protestants. These …show more content…
At this time absolutism was the new form of government brought on by the religious and civil wars of the previous centuries. Louis XIV was the perfect icon for an absolute monarch as he established a centralized government and national bureaucracy and gave supremacy to the Catholic Church. The continuing confrontation between Catholics and Protestants brought the domination of the later new recognized national religion and lack of freedom of citizens due to the strong centralized government which began the rise of one of the most important movements in