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The eighteenth century was a century of
mind-boggling change; when Europeans entered the nineteenth
century, they lived in a world that barely resembled the
beginning of the eighteenth century. In the one hundred
years in between, European thought became overwhelmingly
mechanistic as the natural philosophy of Isaac Newton was
applied to individual, social, political, and economic life.
The century saw the development of the philosophe
movement,which articulated the full values of the European
Enlightenment, including deism, religious tolerance, and
political and economic theories that would dramatically
change the face of European society. Europe itself changed
from a household economy to an industrial economy. This
change, perhaps one of the most earth-shattering transitions
in human history, permanently altered the face of European
society and the family. Finally, the century ended in
revolution. The ideas of the philosophes were
translated into new governments--one in France and one in
America--that shook the old order down to its very
roots.
On continental Europe, the monarchy slowly
developed into more absolutist forms following the theories
of Bossuet and applying the enlightened ideas of the
philosophe movement, which argued that a monarch's
job is to see to the rights and welfare of the governed.
States that had been only loosely centralized, such as
Austria and Russia, became powerfully centralized states,
while states such as Prussia and France further tightened
the centralized control of the monarch. This centralized,
absolutist power of the monarch was used to effect profound
reforms in the structure of justice, government and economic
life. Judicial torture gradually disappeared from the face
of Europe, and the death penalty was radically curtailed.
Government was slowly turned over to the hands of a civil
bureaucracy, and serfs and peasants saw their economic
liberties greatly expanded. The exercise of absolutism,
however, would produce a fiery revolution in France, a
revolution that would forever make the absolute monarchy an
obsolescence.
The century saw the decline of monarchical
power in England. At the beginning of the century, power was
divided between the monarch and the Parliament, but
Parliament refused to engage in any of the reforms going on
in the rest of Europe. Because these reforms were associated
with absolute monarchies, the English refused to participate
in any kind of national legislation. Instead the English
government was run on "interest"; coalitions were built in
Parliament by making promises to varying groups. These
promises were knit together into powerful factions whose
primary job was simply to deliver on the promises. Needless
to say, parliamentary politics was incredibly corrupt.
Members of Parliament secured votes mainly by paying for
them, and the temptation to corruption increased as the
power of the institution increased. This came to a head in
the latter part of the century when George III began to
assert his own prerogatives and replaced parliament
ministers with his own. This crisis, the "battle over
prerogative," eventually was won by Parliament at the end of
the century. This was the last gasp of monarchical power in
England; from this point on, the nation was, for the most
part, run by Parliament.
Finally, a new European nation was
established in America. This nation was forged in a
revolution and built almost entirely upon Enlightenment
ideas. Practically speaking, the final legacy of the
Enlightenment in the eighteenth century would be the
establishment of a fully functioning Enlightenment
government based, theoretically at least, on secular values
and the notions of right and equality. But that, as they
say, is a story for another day.
Richard Hooker
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