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Revolutionary Ideas During The Enlightenment

709 Words3 Pages

The Enlightenment was an important and revolutionary time during Europe’s history. Many new ideas and ways of thinking were formed off of ideas during the Scientific Revolution. The new thoughts were often controversial with previous ideas that were formed by the church, but they were accepted quickly by much of the upper class society. The ideas that were formed during this time were used hundreds of years later to help shape many new governments. During the Enlightenment, people mainly believed what the church told them. However, the Enlightenment thinkers broke away from this norm and started believing what they found through liberty, reason, progress, nature, and happiness. One of these new ideas was treating women more like people and …show more content…

For example, Baron de Montesquieu thought that “The ability to make laws, to carry out laws, and to judge laws should rest in different branches of power [in the government]” (Baron de Montesquieu). The United States adopted this idea when the founding fathers chose to incorporate it into the Constitution. The United States’ government now has a legislative branch that makes laws, an executive branch that enforces laws, and a judicial branch that judges laws. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, he states that “[he] should have sought a country, in which the right of legislation was vested in all the citizens; for who can judge better than they of the conditions under which they had best dwell together…?” (ABC-CLIO Solutions). The United States also used this idea when forming their government because they made the government a democratic republic where people can vote on the laws. The founding fathers agreed with Rousseau that the only people fit to choose laws are the people who have to follow the laws. The United States was not the only country to incorporate Enlightenment ideas into government, but it has the most obvious

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