Contents introduction Chapter I. The Age of Enlightenment

Chapter II. English Enlightenment
2.1.A heated debate among scholars on the existence of English enlightenment
The cultural movement of the Enlightenment began in England. Here, on the loose ground of the bourgeois revolution, many ideas of the whole "enlightenment period" were born.
One such idea was the idea of ​​a “natural man”. This had already been put forward by Hobbes, but Gobbes considers it natural for man to have an infinite desire only for his own benefit; hence the idea of ​​the need for external coercion to maintain social order. For 18th century enlighteners. “Natural man” becomes “man in general” - a peculiar abstraction of a mostly rational, good, and social being. New, bourgeois British thinkers opposed political coercion in the political and religious spheres, ostensibly to re-educate the "natural man." In their view, the feelings, needs, and characteristics of the “natural person” are the norm in relation to the historically established conditions of social life, which are condemned as artificial and false.¹
Feudal institutions were primarily considered such artificial stratification. On the contrary, the natural manifestations of human nature were recognized as the interests of the bourgeois individual, free from shameful feudal ties. The idealization of the bourgeois social system in these ideas was not an expression of conscious class reckoning.
Because of the immaturity of bourgeois relations inherent in the manufactory stage of capitalism, the English Enlightenment could retain illusions about the true nature of the bourgeois social order, sincerely thinking that its ultimate goal was the welfare of all strata of society. However, the most prominent English enlighteners are usually characterized by great moderation in their socio-political views, which is especially evident in their attitude towards religion.
In the eighteenth century. The classical English political economy emerged. His greatest representative was Adam Smith (1723-1790). Smith's economic doctrine develops in the general mainstream of the ideas of the Enlightenment. Without realizing the many contradictions inherent in the bourgeois mode of production, Smith is fully convinced that with the development of bourgeois relations, the welfare of the masses of the people will also increase. In a free competitive society, Smith sees order established by nature itself. He believes in the possibility of reconciling all personal interests and opposes any state interference in the economic life of the country - because “the free activity of individuals is the best and shortest way to achieve the common good”. Smith’s great service is the further development of the labor value theory founded by Petty.
"Adam Smith," wrote Marx, "declared labor in general, and also in the form of its social aggregate, the division of labor, as the sole source of material wealth ...".
Smith made many new contributions to understanding the nature of money. While arguing with the mercantilists, he saw bourgeois wealth as a set of consumer values, and saw money as the only means of circulation, the "big wheel of exchange." Smith also has a beginning in the theory of value added: he sees profit and land rent as deductions from the product of labor in favor of the capitalist and the landowner. However, Smith consistently applies the labor theory of value only to simple commodity economic relations.
The leading genre of English fiction in the eighteenth century. the novel becomes, as Hegel and Belinsky put it, an "epic of bourgeois society." An 18th century genetic novel. Returns to the genre of “pikaresk novel”. This is especially evident in the work of Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), the founder of English Enlightenment literature. His novels, such as "Captain Singleton," "Moll Flanders," and "Colonel Jack," still retain all the hallmarks of a Spanish picaresque novel. But Robinson Crusoe (1719) is an entirely new phenomenon: Defoe significantly expands the boundaries of the old genre, giving it an extraordinary depth, creating a novel of great social and philosophical significance. Robinson Crusoe embodies the illusion of enlightenment about the imaginary independence of man from society, the myth of the "natural man." Criticizing the theories of bourgeois political economy in the eighteenth century, Marx used the term "Robinson" in vain.
With Robinson, a new kind of protagonist enters English literature - the average English bourgeoisie, depicted without any ridiculous grotesque as in the novel Picaresque, or biblical masquerades as in Milton. Defoe captures the prose of life for literature and gives it a poetic color. But bourgeois life is of little use to poetry, and Robinson Crusoe's poetic virtue is achieved through great artistic abstraction. Defoe puts his protagonist in an emergency on an uninhabited island, describing him as a “natural person,” a person in general. Robinson is out of the ordinary social environment; he sees himself face to face with nature, his activities deprived of their own bourgeois features. From this comes Robinson Crusoe’s astonishing epic: the most prosaic details of Robinson’s labor activity are illuminated with real poetry and full of exciting curiosity.
The work of Defoe’s contemporary, the famous publicist and great satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) has a completely different character. Swift's profound nationality was fully manifested in his writings when he was in Ireland, the first colony of British capitalism. His pamphlets - "Letters of the Dressmaker," "An Offer for the Common Use of Irish Manufacturing," "A Humble Offer for the Children of the Poor," and others - are imbued with intense sympathy and hatred for the sufferings of the Irish people. for their slaves - English lords and financial merchants.
Swift's major works are the satirical novel The Tale of the Truck (a religious joke) and Gulliver's Travels (1726), which depicts the destruction of modern civilization in a brutally brutal way.¹
Swift's great work stands alone in eighteenth-century literature with a deeply pessimistic view of the bourgeoisie, but it would be wrong to exclude Swift from the mainstream of European enlightenment. Gulliver himself plays an important role in Swift’s novel; it is not only an interconnectedness of the individual satirical episodes of the novel, but a peculiar norm, a scale to which dwarfs and giants, laputas and yahoos act as the depravity of the common man, his terrible condemnation. Swift’s misanthropy is just another aspect of his humanity.
Fielding’s novels focus on the real world, but are detached from the world of history. So they have a certain abstraction. The protagonist of his best-selling novel, The Story of Tom Jones (1749), is, in general, a "natural man" of the Enlightenment. In Fielding’s works, the bearers of evil are deprived of real power because behind them, as in Balzac, for example, there are still no historical forces; evil is moral, not social, and therefore seems to be easily eradicated. This character of the image stems from the underdevelopment of the contradictions of bourgeois society.
Smollett’s work has essentially new features. In The Adventures of Rodrick Random (1748), The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), and other novels, Fielding's cheerfulness, optimism, and confidence in human kindness have already been lost. Smollett reveals the social contradictions of his time; its horizons are wider and its ability to observe is sharper than its predecessors. According to Gorky, Smollett was "the first to introduce the image of political tendencies into the novel."
The escalation of social conflicts in the second half of the eighteenth century. led to the emergence of a new literary direction in English enlightenment - sentimentalism. Its distinctive feature is its appeal to emotions as the highest principle of life. Sentimentalism reflected the first doubts about the rationality of the new order of life. Still politically unconscious, the vague sense of the contradictions of bourgeois civilization finds expression in sentimental melancholy and appeal to nature.
The first manifestation of these feelings in English literature was the graveyard poetry of Thomson, Gray, Jung, Crabb, and others. More importantly, Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774). In his poem The Abandoned Village and the novel The Priest of the Weakfield, the elegy about the extraordinary images of the patriarchal world and his imminent death is combined with a serious critique of the bourgeois regime.
The most prominent representative of sentimentalism was Lawrence Stern (1713-1768). His novel Sentimental Journey gave its name to the whole literary stream. In Tristram Shandida Stern parodies the whole ideological and artistic structure of the novel Enlightenment: it mocks the sanity of the bourgeoisie, the protagonist of eighteenth-century literature. and finds the extraordinary whims of the saint’s eccentrics at Shendi Hall and the particles of poetry in his good heart - the last piece of old patriarchal England.
In the literature of the last third of the eighteenth century. There are new trends waiting for nineteenth-century romanticism. Among them are McPherson's "Poems of Asia" - a talented stylization of folk tales, ancient Celts, Chatterton and Blake poetry - Byron and Shelley's closest predecessor, as well as Anna Radcliffe's "Gothic" novel, which has its own sad color. half - fantastic medieval plot, interest in everything mysterious, mysterious, illogical.¹
The last third of the eighteenth century holds a special place in English literature. The Scottish People's Poet Robert Burns (1759-1796) wrote his peasant poetry at its peak. Berne described rural life in a realistic way, glorifying peasant labor, but his works sounded as a note of protest against class society, the power of money, and religious bigotry, along with the idealization of the patriarchal countryside.
Scholars have debated the existence of the English Enlightenment. Many British history textbooks say almost nothing about English enlightenment. Some commentaries on the Enlightenment include England, while others ignore it, although they cover great intellectuals such as Joseph Addison, Edward Gibbon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Alexander Pope, Joshua Reynolds, and Jonathan Swift. includes It can be said that the term free thinking, which describes those who oppose the institution of the church and the true faith in the Bible, originated in England in 1713 when Anthony Collins wrote his talk on Free Thought. , which has gained great popularity. This essay attacks the priests of all churches and is a call to deism. Roy Porter points out that the reasons for this neglect were that the movement was largely inspired by the French, who were very religious or anti-clerical, and who openly objected to the order he had established. Porter admits that after the 1720s, England may have considered thinkers to be equal to Diderot, Voltaire, or Rousseau. However, leading intellectuals such as Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke, and Samuel Johnson were more conservative and supported the existing order. Porter said this was due to the early arrival of the Enlightenment in England and the fact that the culture had managed to master the religious tolerance that forced it to fight for the continent’s intellectuals despite political liberalism, philosophical empiricism and strong obstacles. In addition, England rejected the collectivism of the continent and emphasized the improvement of the individual as the main goal of education.
Scotland. During the Scottish Enlightenment, the intellectual infrastructure of mutually supportive institutions, such as universities, reading societies, libraries, periodicals, museums, and masonic lodges, was established in major Scottish cities. The Scottish network "had a largely liberal Calvinist, Newtonian, and 'design' oriented character, which played an important role in the subsequent development of transatlantic enlightenment." In France, Voltaire said, "We look to Scotland with all our ideas about civilization." The focus of Scottish enlightenment was on the work of physician and chemist William Cullen, ranging from intellectual and economic issues to specific scientific issues; James Anderson, agronomist; Joseph Black, physicist and chemist; and the first modern geologist, James Hutton.
Several Americans, most notably Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, played important roles in spreading Enlightenment ideas to the New World and influencing British and French thinkers. Franklin was impressed with his political activism and achievements in physics. The cultural exchanges of the Enlightenment went in both directions across the Atlantic. Thinkers such as Payne, Locke, and Russo see the cultural practices of Native Americans as examples of natural freedom. Americans closely followed English and Scottish political ideas, as well as some French thinkers such as Montesquieu. As deists, they were influenced by the ideas of John Toland (1670-1722) and Matthew Tindal (1656-1733). During the Enlightenment, great emphasis was placed on freedom, republicanism, and religious tolerance. There was no respect for monarchy and hereditary political power. Deists reconciled science and religion, rejecting prophecy, miracles, and biblical divinity. Leading deists include Thomas Payne in The Age of Wisdom and Thomas Jefferson in the Jefferson Bible, in which all the supernatural is removed.
Science played an important role in the speech and thinking of the Enlightenment. Many writers and thinkers of the Enlightenment were educated in science and associated scientific progress with the overthrow of religion and traditional authorities for the development of freedom of speech and thought. The scientific advances of the Enlightenment include the discovery of carbon dioxide (clear air) by the chemist Joseph Black, the deep-time evidence of geologist James Hutton, and the invention of the condensing steam engine by James Watt. Lavoisier's experiments were used to create the first modern chemical plants in Paris, and the experiments of the Montgolfier brothers enabled them to fly the first manned balloon on November 21, 1783, from Château de la Muet, near Bois.
Leonhard Euler's (1707–1783) extensive contributions to mathematics included major results in analysis, number theory, topology, combinatorics, graph theory, algebra, and geometry (among other fields). In applied mathematics, he made fundamental contributions to mechanics, hydraulics, acoustics, optics, and astronomy. He worked at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg (1727–1741), then at the Prussian Royal Academy of Sciences and Belles Art (1741–1766) in Berlin, and finally at the Imperial Academy in St. Petersburg (1766).
In general, the science of the Enlightenment placed great emphasis on empiricism and rational thinking and was associated with the ideals of enlightenment and progress. The study of the sciences under the heading of natural philosophy is divided into a conglomeration of physics and chemistry and natural sciences, which include anatomy, biology, geology, mineralogy, and zoology. As with most Enlightenment views, the benefits of science were not visible to everyone: Rousseau criticized science for alienating man from nature and making people unhappy. Enlightenment was dominated by scientific societies and academies, which replaced universities primarily as centers of scientific research and development. Societies and academies also formed the basis of the scientific profession. Another important event was the popularity of science among the growing literacy population. Philosophers introduced the public to many scientific theories, especially through the popularization of the Encyclopedia and Newtonism by Voltaire and Emilie du Chatelet. Some historians refer to the 18th century as a difficult period in the history of science. However, this century saw significant advances in medicine, mathematics, and physics; development of biological taxonomy; a new understanding of magnetism and electricity; the maturity of chemistry as a science that laid the foundations of modern chemistry.¹
The first scientific and literary journals were written during the Enlightenment. The first journal, the Parisian Journal des Schavans, appeared in 1665. However, periodicals only began to be published in 1682. French and Latin were the main publishing languages, but demand for materials was also strong in German and Dutch. In general, the demand for English publications on the continent was low, as evidenced by the fact that the English language had no interest in French works either. Non-internationally demanding languages ​​such as Danish, Spanish, and Portuguese had difficulty making the journal a success, and international languages ​​were often used instead. French gradually acquired the status of lingua franca of the academy from Latin. This, in turn, gave preference to the Dutch publishing industry, which produced most of these French-language periodicals.
Jonathan called Israeli magazines the most influential cultural innovation of European intellectual culture. They shifted the focus of the “cultural community” from established authority to innovation and innovation, instead promoting “enlightened” ideals of tolerance and intellectual objectivity. They were a covert critique of existing notions of universal truth monopolized by monarchies, parliaments, and religious authorities as a source of knowledge derived from science and reason. They also promoted the “legitimacy of God-appointed authority” —the Christian enlightenment that supported the Bible, in which there was to be a compromise between biblical and natural theories.