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15 November, 14:20

How did the English civil war effect the enlightenment

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  1. 15 November, 14:32
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    The English Civil War had two important results for Enlightenment thinking in England. First, the Civil War stimulated thinking about the nature and purpose of political power. Both Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704), two of the most important political philosophers of the Enlightenment, were directly influenced in their thinking by the English Civil War and its aftermath. Thomas Hobbes lived through the Civil War as an adult and witnessed the brutality and violence that, he believed, went along with a society without a government. In his work, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes considered that humans can be entirely free, in the "state of nature," but that the state of nature was necessarily a war of "all against all" and that made life "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." His view of how human society looked in the state of nature compelled him to support absolute monarchy because although humans were less free, they also avoided the horrors of civil war. On the other hand, John Locke lived in the period of Restoration, in which the English monarchs attempted to work alongside Parliament and avoid war. In the end, Parliament was able to remove the Stuart monarchs and compel the newly elected rulers, William of Orange (1650-1702) and his wife (1662-1694) to agree to the English Bill of Rights, that limited the power of the monarchy without bloodshed. This peaceful process made Locke's political philosophy more moderate than Hobbes. In his work, Two Treatises of Government, Locke considered that consent of the governed was what created legitimate from illegitimate government. Given that part of the conflict between the Stuart monarchs and Parliament had been over religious issues, Locke also argued for religious toleration and a separation of church and state. Second, aside from how the Civil War affected those who lived through them and how they viewed politics, they also indirectly contributed to the support for science in England. When Charles II (r. 1660-1685) became king of England after the Civil War, he wanted to increase his prestige and mark the return of royal power but without antagonizing Parliament. One way Charles accomplished this was by supporting science and establishing the Royal Society in 1660. The Royal Society became one of the leading institutions supporting scientific investigation and inquiry in Europe. Its members included important thinkers, perhaps none more important than Isaac Newton (1642-1726), whose work on physics was to be the essential model of physics and astronomy until the late 19th century.
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