Was the French Republic of Virtue a natural outgrowth of the Enlightenment, or was it a betrayal of the ideals of the Enlightenment?

The Enlightenment is generally affiliated with France and particularly its philosophes of the 18th century whose large titles encompass Beaumarchais, Diderot, Laplace, Rousseau, and Voltaire. But this is mistaken. It started about a century previous with numbers like Descartes and Spinoza, and first coalesced in England round numbers like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. The new considering, although, disperses quickly. Its influence was sensed in Scotland by David Hume and Adam Smith and in the American colonies by Jefferson, Franklin, and Thomas Paine. It journeyed to the Germany of Lessing and Mendelssohn, Kant and Hegel, Schiller and Goethe. Even Spain, shrouded in the darkness of a feudal absolutism, skilled its consequences through the amazing assembly of thinkers centering round the philosopher Olivares and the decorator Goya.Its new standards were disperse in Latin America by Simon Bolivar and its essence motivated Toussaint L'Ouverture.

The Enlightenment was, in short, an authentically worldwide occurrence with a political and ideological dynamic whose centre standards drawn from from the burgeoning liberalism of the 17th century. Liberalism was attached with a revolutionary firm promise to republicanism, tolerance, and experimentation. It provided the constituents of what would become the "third estate" a new sense of their privileges and their dignity.5 Liberalism asserted on the parting of Church and state. It preoccupied itself, for this cause, with a secular answer to the injustices endured by the outsider and a new idea of ethical, other than only material progress. It searched to overwhelm prejudice and coercion supportive a reasonable adjudication of grievances. Indeed, from the first, liberalism started the up to date anxiety with constraining the random workout of power on which any popular pattern of socialism would have to build. Its presuppositions were developed in England by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. They primarily recognised the public realm with "political society" or the state and the personal realm with the interplay of specific concerns and individual house in "civil society." They looked neither to annals neither to devout dogma in alignment to legitimate what shortly would become a new political worldview. Instead, they made certain abstract assumptions about human environment, recognised them with the increasing bourgeoisie, and drew the penalties for politics.

Deluded by assumptions of unilinear advancement, the sentimentality of humanism, intoxicated by technical rationality, complacent in their ...