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Age of Enlightenment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (4450 words) |
 | Thus The Enlightenment extolled the ideals of liberty, property and rationality which are still recognizable as the basis for most political philosophies even in the present era; that is, of a free individual being mostly free within the dominion of the state whose role is to provide stability to those natural laws. |
| The Enlightenment was a time when the solar system was truly "discovered": with the accurate calculation of orbits, such as Halley's comet, the discovery of the first planet since antiquity, Uranus by William Herschel, and the calculation of the mass of the Sun using Newton's theory of universal gravitation. |
| Alternatively, the Enlightenment was used as a powerful symbol to argue for the supremacy of rationalism and rationalization, and therefore any attack on it is connected to despotism and madness, for example in the writings of Gertrude Himmelfarb and Robert Nozick. |
| The Enlightenment and Liberalism (2131 words) |
| The Enlightenment refers to an intellectual movement, primarily in France and Britain, that spans approximately one hundred years from the 1680s to 1789. |
| Enlightenment writings demonstrate a shift away from the view that society and estates (ranks of nobility and the common people) are the basic unit of social analysis and toward the view that the individual is the basis. |
| Enlightenment thinkers were generally optimistic in outlook, looking on their system of thought as a way of improving the social world. |
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