Enlightenment
People began to experience that they were increasingly capable of transforming the world in which they lived through individual initiative. The industrial revolution signified the beginning of a stage of rapid production and distribution for goods for consumption. This production was based on the ability to transform nature, an ability which was previously unknown. A different historical process accounted for these events and had its origins in the same period; the social movement which demanded modern liberties and which took form in a very special way in the French
Renaissance.
Henceforth religious freedom was bound to the other freedoms and rights of persons..
Mutually independent and came to consciousness in the group of intellectual currents known
as the Enlightenment.
This Enlightenment only demands freedom, and certainly it is the most inoffensive of all
freedoms which bears the name, that is, the freedom to make public use of one's own reason
in any field. The Enlightenment meant that, thanks to the free use of freedom, humanity
was coming of age, the modern passion for liberty-free commerce, freedom of thought, individual choice, political emancipation.
The philosophy of the Enlightenment offered freedom from the fatalism, passivity, and barrenness of Scholastic philosophy and from the narrowness and rigidity of ecclesiastic morality. The Renaissance humanists had been trying to break free of the medieval world view and the structures of Christian morality; the philosophies of the Enlightenment had fought against the decadent social order and the absolutism of the unenlightened monarchs.
The Enlightenment was an Eighteenth century liberation movement. The 18th century
marks the beginning of revolution in different fields of human activity. In this period,
humanity acquired a clear awareness of its capacity to know and transcend nature and
society; that is to say, to transform history by taking it into hand. It is in this
context that bourgeois society sprang up.
[185, 187, 270]
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