Age of Enlightenment Reforms

The purpose of this research is to examine the reform priorities of sundry thinkers and writers working in and around the Age of Enlightenment. The plan of the research will be to set forth the general character of Enlightenment thought, which as a philosophical discipline prevailed mainly during the eighteenth century in Europe, and then to show how the writings of various European commentators of the period sought to portray and advocate the impulse toward a generally institutionalized category of socialization that would have the effect of altering, irrevocably and for the better, the typical way of being of the typical individual citizen of the typically civilized state. As appropriate, the research will suggest why advocacy of a reformist temperament during the Enlightenment represented a new way of viewing what constituted civilized livelihood, statehood, and modes of being in Western Civilization.

When one considers en masse a large body of Enlightenment thought, one is struck by the general consistency of expression and attitude. The principal figures of its philosophy appear in this sense to stand upon one another's shoulders, inasmuch as they deal in a consistent way with topics that claim philosophical attention for them. Aside from their attachment to specific sociopolitical themes as the status of laws, the content of ethics, the nature of science, moral philosophy, and the like, there is a mode of inquiry that recurs that is worthy of note and worthy of being

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are contained in the categories of natural being. And if man could be improved, so would the society in which he would operate. On this view, the psychology of man (criminal and aristocrat alike) would achieve consonance with the best of social possibilities. But for this to be possible, it is first necessary for the society of which the individual is a part to behave in a civilized way. This is the subtext of Beccaria's plea against a society of institutionalized violence, and this is why he concludes his discussion of crime and punishment by suggesting that he has put forward "a general theorem of considerable utility" (1:99). This points of course toward liberal utilitarianism and the kind of positivism that would test new ideas of moral philosophy in the real world. If as Beccaria suggests, punishment that is "public, prompt, necessary, the least possible in the given circumstances, proportionate to the crimes, [and] dictated by the laws" (1:99) is employed by a civilized society, which is to say if that society allows itself to be reformed, then the man whose psychology deliberately resisted improvement and reasoned moral organization could be set apart from the whole of others who have decided to create a unitarian comp

Category: History - A