American Enlightenment

A tradition in political thought imported to revolutionary America particularly by Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, and Paine. Jefferson drew on both the French and the Scottish Enlightenment; Paine especially on French Enlightenment and revolutionary thought. However, they did more than simply import Enlightenment ideas and views to America; they modified and applied them. In the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Jefferson, in the Constitution, and in the bill of rights, which was due among others to Jefferson (who had promulgated the Virginia Declaration of Religious Freedom on which the First Amendment was modelled) and Madison, American Enlightenment thought went beyond its teachers to produce documents that survive to this day. Jefferson also had a role in reimporting the Enlightenment to France. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789, still incorporated in the modern French constitution (see also constitution), is in part an American statement of rights and in part a Rousseauvian statement of citizenship.

In the early nineteenth-century United States there was a reaction against the secular tone of Enlightenment thought. Jefferson had been a religious agnostic, but with a high opinion of Jesus as an ethical teacher, and Paine an antichristian deist. In the religious reaction that followed, Paine died in poverty and obscurity and Jefferson in his last years retreated to ‘the consolations of a sound philosophy, equally indifferent to hope and fear’.

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The American Enlightenment is a term sometimes employed to describe the intellectual culture of the British North American colonies and the early United States (as they became known following the American Revolution). It was a part of a larger intellectual movement known as the Age of Enlightenment. Influenced by the scientific revolution of the 17th century, the Enlightenment took scientific reasoning and applied it to human nature and society.

v • d • e Figures in the Age of Enlightenment by country   Notable figures British Colonies Benjamin Franklin · Thomas Jefferson · James Madison · Thomas Paine Prussia and Saxe-Weimar Immanuel Kant · Gotthold Ephraim Lessing · Johann Gottfried von Herder · Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · J.C.F. von Schiller · Moses Mendelssohn England Edward Gibbon · Samuel Johnson · Mary Wollstonecraft · John Locke  · Isaac Newton · Thomas Hobbes Scotland Joseph Black · James Boswell · Adam Ferguson · David Hume · Thomas Reid · Adam Smith France Montesquieu · François Quesnay · Voltaire · Buffon · Jean-Jacques Rousseau · Denis Diderot · Helvétius · Jean le Rond d'Alembert · Baron d'Holbach · Marquis de Sade · Condorcet · Étienne Bonnot de Condillac Italy Cesare Beccaria Spain Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos · Benito Jerónimo Feijoo · Antonio de Ulloa Portugal Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, Marquis of Pombal Poland Hugo Kołłątaj · Ignacy Krasicki · Samuel Bogumił Linde · Adam Naruszewicz · Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz · Józef Maksymilian Ossoliński · Stanisław August Poniatowski · Stanisław Staszic · Jędrzej Śniadecki · Franciszek Zabłocki   Related topics Atheism · Capitalism · Civil liberties · Critical thinking · Deism · Democracy · Diafotismos · Empiricism · Enlightened absolutism · Free markets · Haskalah · Humanism · Liberalism · Natural philosophy · Rationality · Reason · Sapere aude · Science · Socialism · Secularism · French Encyclopédistes · German Classicism

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