THE 18th CENTURY AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The 18th century is often spoken of as “the Enlightenment”. This is as informative and as misleading as identifying the 15th and 16th centuries with “the Renaissance”. Like the Renaissance, the Enlightenment was a movement, made possible by particular social conditions – first of all the establishment of a public sphere allowing more exchange of ideas than could be controlled by the absolutist states – not least through an immense number of newspapers and journals. The movement had its centre in France and the philosophes – Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, etc. Since the movement was rooted in a broad public sphere, the philosophes saw the purpose of knowledge to be general welfare, not theoretical knowledge produced for its own sake and belonging to specialists. The sciences that were most strongly influenced by the Enlightenment were therefore those having to do with human beings and their society – not least the political and economic organization of society (Montesquieu, Rousseau, the physiocrats and Smith). Natural sciences made impressive progress during the century, certainly also under the influence of the Enlightenment mood, but what happened to astronomy, mathematics and the earth sciences had more to do with the organization of scientific life in institutions furthered by the state power, in particular the Paris, Berlin and St. Petersburg Academies (chemistry and natural history remained more private affairs). A first text, excerpted from the Encyclopédie, expresses the new attitude to the purpose of scientific knowledge. It is followed by two representing the mathematics of the century, one (Wolff) a lexicon intended for the university environment and for officers, another one (Euler) exemplifying the highest level of the new mathematics. Natural history, geology and chemistry are represented by excerpts from Linné, Pallas and Lavoisier. A final groups of texts is closer to the Enlightenment: La Mettrie's L'homme machine, which eliminates the separate soul and replaces it by active matter; Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws; Rousseau, On the Social Contract; Smith, The Wealth of Nations; Burke's Reflections of the Revolution in France; and Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge.