The Enlightenment
The Classical PeriodThe madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything but his reason.
Godfrey Kneller, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Ever abounding in humility, philosophers of the eighteenth century called their age "The Enlightenment."
Many philosophers of this time period imagined the "state of nature," or what mankind would be like left on his own, free from the expectations and constraints of society, law, or morality. This led to different theories about how government and society developed, which led to different ideas about what a government should do.
Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) was an English philosopher who believed that the state of nature was a lawless "war of all against all." Free from all moral and legal constraints, people would just do whatever they could get away with to serve their own interests. Government, therefore, is formed to establish laws granting certain rights and taking away the corresponding freedoms in order to protect people from each other. Another Englishman, John Locke (1632 - 1704), believed that in the state of nature, people would still have natural rights to "life, health, liberty, and possessions." However, even though these rights are part of human nature, people sometimes don't respect them. When this happens, governments are formed, not to grant these rights, but to secure them.
In France, Francois-Marie Arouet (1694 - 1778), better known as Voltaire, was a French satirist who did not so much have a political philosophy of his own as relentlessly critiqued and lampooned the political and social order of his day. He hated the French monarchy, society, and especially Christianity. His political thought was largely shaped by an exile in England, and he became an advocate of the freedom of speech and constitutional government he encountered there. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778) was a Genevan/French philosopher who believed that in the state of nature, mankind was naturally virtuous until corrupted by illusions like property and individual rights. People, he thought, should therefore give up any claims to natural rights, which would then leave only the common good to consider.
Across the Atlantic, the American statesman (and later president) Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826), the author of the Declaration of Independence, reiterated John Locke's views that man is endowed, not by the government, but by the Creator, with "certain inalienable rights... among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
François-Auguste Biard, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In one of the great ironies of history, the "Enlightenment" was also the height of the Atlantic slave trade. The practice of human slavery had been happily absent from Europe for a thousand years during the medieval period, but was reintroduced in the fifteenth century as explorers from Spain, Portugal, France, and Great Britain connected Europe, Africa, and the Americas through a network of trade routes.
Most infamous was the Triangle Trade: in Africa, the Ottoman and Asanti Empires, Barbary states, Kingdom of Congo, and other African powers would enslave and sell conquered neighbors to European merchants. Occasionally, Europeans would conduct slave raids themselves. Enslaved people would then be transported under harsh conditions across the Atlantic and sold in exchange for fruit, sugar, rum, cocoa, and other New World products. These products were then brought to Europe and traded for gold, weapons, and technology, which were sailed to Africa and the process was repeated.
Visiting America in 1835, the French nobleman Alexis de Toqueville wrote, "There is one evil which has crept secretly into the world: at first its presence scarcely makes itself felt amid the usual abuses of power; it begins with one individual whose name history does not record; it is cast like an accursed seed somewhere in the soil; it then feeds itself, grows without effort, and spreads naturally inside the society which has accepted it: that evil is slavery. Christianity had destroyed slavery; Christians of the sixteenth century restored it, even though they only ever acknowledged it as an exception to their social system. They carefully restricted it to one single human race; thus they inflicted a wound on humanity... infinitely more difficult to cure."
The law may abolish slavery, but only God can remove its effects.
The Atlantic slave trade lasted roughly three-and-a-half centuries, during which time it is believed over twelve million Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas. Both Great Britain and the United States abolished the slave trade in 1808. Great Britain made slavery fully illegal in 1833, although it continued in the United States until the end of the Civil War in 1865. The last major power to outlaw slavery was Brazil in 1888. The social and economic impact of slavery would last far longer.