How Did The Industrial Revolution Influence From The Period Of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment covered a period of time in western civilization roughly from the mid 1600s to the end of the 1700s. It is characterized by the many influential scholars who proposed to use reason and critical thinking as opposed to hearsay, superstition, or divine intervention to explain the universe. As Frank Thackeray and John Findling, authors of Events That Changed the World in the Eighteenth Century explain, “It was a new way of looking at the world that emphasized reason and natural law at the expense of revealed truth and tradition, and it held out the promise of almost unlimited progress for mankind” (Thackeray and Findling 1998, 77). Scholars such as Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes wanted to free people from ignorance in the hopes that it would lead to a happier, more productive society. As a side-effect of this enlightenment, science prospered because it too emphasized reason and skepticism. Consequently, the Scientific Revolution often overlaps with developments that …show more content…
Arguments can be made equally either way, but I would suggest that the combination of influences from the Scientific Revolution, the period of enlightenment, and the Agricultural Revolution all combined to make the Industrial Revolution more significant. As John Green of Crash Course asserts, nothing much changed throughout history in the lives of the average citizen until the Industrial Revolution (Green 2012). Once the Industrial Revolution gained momentum, it created new industry, new infrastructure, new incentives for work, new economies, and new government institutions. The Industrial Revolution had a greater impact on the majority of the world’s population and all of today’s technology stemmed from this movement. Thus, the Industrial Revolution was more revolutionary and influential than the period of