History 4403
Study
Questions 1
Jacob, The Enlightenment, 1-15
1. By what year can we say the Enlightenment was well under way?
2. What did it mean to be éclairé or enlightened?
Were there particular institutions involved in this?
3. Who in 18th-century European society was most likely to be able to
call themselves enlightened?
4. Which work of Sir Isaac Newton does Jacob credit with being the
source of the metaphor of light that is so prevalent in the
Enlightenment?
5. How and in what work did the Scots poet James Thomson popularize
Newton's ideas?
6. What other signs were there that the findings of scientists like
Newton were reaching a wider public?
7. Between its beginnings in the later 17th century and its full
development by the later 18th century the Enlightenment had transformed
itself. In what specfically did the transformation consist?
8. A series of revolutions are listed that unfolded in different places
in Europe and the Americas in the later 18th century. Which were
these?
9. Why does Jacob describe John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas
Jefferson as philosophes?
10. What two political events in 1685 inaugurated the political
forces driving the Enlightenment according to Jacob and what were their
results?
11. What specifically did James II do that upset political stability in
Britain and what were the specific remedies and results?
12. Over what two periods of history were those who supported the
"old-style monarchy" and those who did not most contentious and why?
13. What were John Locke's views on these two periods and how did he
propose to remedy the problems he saw as at the root of the hardships
through Britain suffered during them?
14. Who were the Whigs and what did they want in the 1680s?
15. What were John Locke's main points in the Two Treatises of Government (1690)
and what later influence did they have according to Jacob?
16. Explain the following terms from British politics: Whigs, Tories,
Republicans, lay and clerical Whigs.
17. Explain the following terms: deists,
anticlericalists, atheists.
18. What were Louis XIV's aims in the War of the League of Augsburg
(1688-1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713)?
19. What were the three core areas of ideas that the Enlightenment
fostered?
20. Why was William III of
Britain/Willem III stadhouderof
the Dutch Republic praised by those promoting the Enlightenment?