How Did The Enlightenment Influence Educated People Called The Enlightenment

The idea of human problems being able to be solved by reason is called the Enlightenment, or The Age of Reason. The ideas of this inspired educated people throughout Europe and beyond. Salons, places where Parisian woman held gatherings, were used to debate the new ideas. They were all so inspired by these ideas that they shared their thoughts by writing their ideas in books, magazines, and inexpensive pamphlets. This helped the ideas get around to other educated people. The Enlightenment reached its peak by the 1700s, this was the time Paris was a center of intellectual activity. As the Enlightenment got more and more popular people tried to find new ways to use reason to improve all of their human conditions. Thomas Hobbes was an English thinker who wrote about his views on government in his book Leviathan. He believed all people were selfish and greedy, he got this from the violence of the English civil war. He wrote people would lead lives that were “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” He believed that people needed a government to impose orders. Hobbes invented the “social contract” which was
He argued that all people were born equal with the natural rights of life, liberty, and property. He stated that the reason for government was to protect peoples natural rights. In his book Two Treatises on Government, he described the fairness of law. A quote from his book was “Those who are united into one body, and have a common established law and judicature (court system) to appeal to, with authority to decide controversies between them, and punish offenders, are in civil society one another…” Locke believed if a government failed to protect its citizens natural rights, then they had the right to overthrow it. His beliefs later became a foundation for modern democracy and his ideas inspired later revolutionaries in Europe and the