Enlightenment+Thinkers+and+Human+Government

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Terms to know:

John Locke Jean-Jacques Rousseau Enlightenment Voltaire Condorcet Diderot The Mayflower Compact Enlightened Despot philosophes Adam Smith //The Wealth of Nations// capitalism Thomas Hobbes enlightened monarchs Bishop Jacques Bossuet //The Social Contract//

Discussion Question: For what reasons did Locke and Rousseau come to the conclusion that the most effective type of human government is a republic? What were the differences in the reasons given by Locke and those given by Rousseau?

I. The Mayflower Pact & the Social Contract A. **John Locke**, **Jean-Jacques Rousseau** In your text much is made of a movement in the 17th century called the “**Enlightenment**” in which thinkers such as **Voltaire**, **Rousseau**, **Condorcet**, and **Diderot** began to try to apply reason and scientific principles of inquiry to the understanding of the human species, human behavior, and human government. This process was, by necessity, philosophical in nature and varied. We cannot say that most enlightenment thinkers had the same opinions on any subject, except the idea that reason and science could lead to human perfection.

Some thinkers stressed the stability and efficiency of monarchy. A rational king, what they called an “**enlightened despot**” all powerful, who made decisions based on scientific and rational principles, informed by the latest science and social theory, they thought was the perfect government. Others felt that though it was inefficient, democracy better addressed the reality of human nature. The question for many was, how can humans best be organized into a society that provides maximum benefits, minimum crime and the best security? These enlightenment era thinkers called themselves “**philosophes**”. Their ideas were published in the books that were becoming increasingly available because of the advent and growth in numbers of the printing press throughout Europe. Moreover, these ideas reached nearly every group in Europe because these printers, looking for growing markets, were having important works translated into the various European languages, making it easier for lay people with little education to read nearly anything. The philosophes' books, because they discussed things people were interested in, and because they were often controversial, became quite popular.

Among the philosophes was a man by the name of **Adam Smith**, who put his formidable intellect to work trying to understand how money and wealth worked by applying scientific methods to the study of trade, and treating economic exchange as a kind of “natural” human activity. By attempting, just like naturalists who studied the behavior of animals, to understand how trade worked as a human behavior, and whether the movement of money worked according to natural laws. Smith wrote **//The Wealth of Nations//**, a book that has become the basis of **capitalism**, suggesting that a free market, in which people trade what they have, and that such trade is immeasurably facilitated by the existence of capital (thus capital-//ism//), and that to leave individuals to trade in their best interests creates a diverse market in which the goods people want are sold, and those that people don’t want are not, forcing competition, the production of quality products, price efficiencies, etc. is the most efficient way to operate an economy. Smith’s most important argument was that, contrary to the realities of the time, government should not regulate or act on the market in any way, and that such freedom would benefit everyone – growing prosperity in one area would create more power to make purchases in other areas, etc… until the entire wealth of a nation grew as a result.

While Smith was a pioneer, his contemporaries were also hard at work applying science to social problems. One of those key areas was government itself. **Thomas Hobbes**, John Locke, and Jean-Jaques Rousseau tried to understand from where the authority of government derives.

This was a critical question of the age. Powerful absolute monarchs such as France’s Louis XIV in the 17th century were “**enlightened monarchs**” in the sense that they were actively trying to centralize and rationalize their governments to make law and taxation more efficient, in to improve the power and security of the state. Enlightened monarchs supported scientific inquiry, and used it to create military technology and support the growing central power of the state. At the same time, though, these “enlightened monarchs” manipulated their economies in attempts to maximize their own income, and most thought of themselves as ruling by divine right. **Bishop Jacques Bossuet**, a French priest, had elucidated this idea most directly when he claimed that a monarch was not only ruler because she/he was chosen by God, but that God’s choice of that ruler made her/him semi-divine. Thus the question of legitimacy was sealed, and to rebel against a king was tantamount to a mortal sin. This led to great security for the governmental system, and a sense that royal authority had no limits.


 * Thomas Hobbes** came, in his own scientific inquiries, to support this power, though not for the reason of divine right that Bossuet had expounded. Instead, Hobbes decided to go back to what he theorized was the human “state of nature” – what, he asked himself, were humans like before government was invented? His answer is that human life before government was probably “nasty, brutish, and short.” Humans, Hobbes thought, were rude beings whose instincts were to accumulate material posessions and make relationships with each other. To that end, humans would do whatever it took to get the posessions and relationships they wanted, including fighting each other to the death over them.

Hobbes thus theorized that human government had been created in order to create security – to end the situation of chaos that his state of nature suggested. In order to do that, Hobbes said, humans had created a sovereign – a king – and given over to that king all power over everyone in society – giving up all their rights in the process – in order that the king could use that power to create and maintain order and security. In Hobbes’ view, the king needed total control of all in society in order to keep the peace. Because of the very nature of that pact, rebellion, and overthrow of the King, was neither desirable nor legal, regardless of how badly the king may have treated them.


 * John Locke** started from a similar premise. He also posited a state of nature in which humans by instinct tended to try to accumulate material posessions and form relationships with each other. Locke believed, also, that in cases where the desires/needs of one human met those of another, violence was likely to break out. He also thought that humans were rational, and so when they reached situations such situations, they would try to find a way to work out their differences. Locke thus wrote that humans formed government not only to protect themselves from each other, but to facilitate their natural tendency to accumulate material posessions and relationships without hurting each other. In otherwords, people came together in a contract, like businesses do, that was designed to form government, and the function of government was to maximize the freedom of people to trade and to associate with each other, while minimizing the negative effects of such relations through law. The government, Locke thus believed, like Hobbes, received its authority not from God, but from those it governed. Further, Locke believed, unlike Hobbes, that government had to be answerable to the people who created it, not to control them, but to serve their interests. Interestingly enough, Locke was writing in a period of English history during which a debate was raging about taxes. Particularly at issue in England was whether the king had the right to take income taxes. Locke was among the majority of Britons who believed that taking income taxes constituted theft on the part of the government. He therefore was arguing in his thesis that since government derives its powers solely from the consent of the governed, taxes had to be approved by the people, and he said directly that if the government claimed more of the material goods or loyalties of the people than they were prepared to give, it was their duty to overthrow the government and create a new social contract.

In a similar vein, but with more social emphasis than Locke, the Frenchman **Jean-Jacques Rousseau** was writing about what he called, quite specifically, **//The Social Contract//**. Rousseau also believed, like Locke, that people create government to facilitate their needs and rights, not to limit them just for the sake of security. Rousseau went further, however, in saying that the social contract was an agreement to a set of rules, made by representatives elected by the people of the sociey. That set of rules involved not only the government’s responsibility to the governed, but the responsibility of the people to each other. Rousseau believed that crime, for example, was not the result of bad people. Instead, he thought that bad people who commit crimes were the result of faulty behavioral rules in the society. Thus, when someone commits a crime, society not only must punish the criminal, but must find out what social problems led to the crime, and solve them. We are all, Rousseau thought, responsible for each other.

As these intellectuals continued to search and argue about the most rational and effective form of government, and the source of government's authority, an experiment in the application of these ideas was also taking shape. In the 1660's and 1670's people of European descent would create a new society, and a new government to administer to it, from whole cloth. They were heavily influenced by the ideas of Locke and Rousseau, and their industrious, competitive economy would in turn inspire Adam Smith to rethink the way business and money - and the market - work.