Voltaire's Impact On The French Revolution

1077 Words5 Pages
When legislative and ruling bodies are incompetent and avaricious .The common people suffer,system starts falling apart.Humanity rots and society becomes depraved. These are the times when people look for ways to end their misery. One such example is 17th century France where clergy and noblemen were the epitome of power and opulence, while the poor didn't even have bread, diseases were rampant and their was anarchy in every household, there was social and economic inequality. This was the time when new political and religious ideas emerged from the enlightenment-the ideas which promised a better life for general public of France-, this enlightenment along with social economic and political instability paved the way for French Revolution. Enilghtment…show more content…
He argued for a society based upon reason rather than faith and Catholic doctrine, for a new civil order based on natural law, and for science based on experiments and observation. While the Philosophes of the French Enlightenment were not revolutionaries, and many were members of the nobility, their ideas played an important part in undermining the legitimacy of the Old Regime and shaping the French Revolution much of what is incorporated in the scientific method (the nature of knowledge, evidence, experience, and causation) and some modern attitudes towards the relationship between science and religion were developed by his protégés David Hume and Adam Smith.Hume became a major figure in the skeptical philosophical and empiricist traditions of philosophy. Another enlightment thinker Immanuel Kant tried to reconcile rationalism and religious belief, individual freedom and political authority, as well as map out a view of the public sphere through private and public…show more content…
The key principle to be applied to any investigation of our cognitive capacities is, then, an attempt to discover the causes of human belief. According to Hume, the proper goal of philosophy should be simply to explain why we believe what we do. His own attempt to achieve that goal was the focus of Book I of the Treatise of Human Nature and all of the first Enquiry. Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, often considered the first work on modern economics It was immediately preceded and influenced by Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune drafts of Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth. The Wealth of Nations argued that a market economy could produce far more wealth than an economy regulated by the state. He considered there to be three natural laws of economics. (1) People act for selfish reasons,thus companies produce goods to make a profit, not to help society. (2) When companies operate in a free market, the law of competition forces them to make good products in order toe tay in business. (3) The law of supply and demand ensures that businesses will produce the goods desired and at the lowest possible price, All of these ideas led to people believing in liberation and realising that they could fare much better without clergy and

    More about Voltaire's Impact On The French Revolution

      Open Document