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Causes Of The Enlightenment

Decent Essays

The late 1600s and the 1700s was the era of many changes in the thinking and reasoning. Since there was the division in the churches and the people were discovering science, everyone started questioning the ways of life that’s been followed for a thousand years. Philosophers looked, thought, and wrote about how the society could change for the better. The time period takes place mainly in Europe and it’s known as the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason.
The Enlightenment happened, but how did it start, and what were the factors that lead to it? The first factor that led to the era was the invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg in 1455. Books, articles, and other paper materials can be printed multiple times, making the prices …show more content…

Most parts of Europe were under monarchy, and that was the way it had been for a long time. But as people started questioning the church, they also questioned the position of the king, because if the church is corrupted, then the king could be as well. Other problems as a monarch especially an absolute monarch, is that they controlled everything. They made the laws, controlled religious authorities, used armies to expand the country, and limited the power of the nobles (Doc. C). Because of that, the people’s individual freedom was suppressed. And all of these factors helped led to the Enlightenment, where ideas spread about how society should run.
In the Enlightenment, a pair of philosophers thought about how the govt. could change so there wouldn’t be a person abusing the power, and they found a solution. Their names were Charles de Secondat and Baron de Montesquieu. They wrote a book called The Spirit of the Laws in 1749 (Doc. E), it explained that to prevent the power of abuse, there needed to be checks and balances and the separation of powers, like the idea they presented, legislative, executive, and judiciary within the administrative. With the separation, everyone can have freedom. This idea was different from what was previously believed because the government was a monarchy, people had to listen to the king because God chose him to be one to govern the country and there was corruption But since the protestant reformation changed that view, a new form of

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