Enlightenment Thinkers Dbq Essay

Think it’s easy to give up your celebratory pizza or quit your midnight snacking so easily?, to change your lifesytle in a snap? The 17th to the 18th century was considered as the Enlightenment or The Age of Reason. During the Enlightenment in Europe and Russia, philosophes or Enlightenment thinkers looked for patterns in nature and applied it to society to ameliorate it. People also challenged the old traditional ways of life and knowledge. What was their main idea? The main idea of the philosophes was greater individual freedom. This idea was a key part of their thinking in three areas: politics, religion, and the economy as well as social equality.

First, Locke’s main idea was important to ideas on government because it promoted cizitens having the power to govern themselves and to possess rights. In Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government, he writes,”freedom to order their actions, and dispose [manage] their possessions and persons”

Smith discusses the importance of individual freedom as it regards financial liberties when he writes, “Every man… is left perfectly free to purse his own interest in his own way” (Doc C). Smith believed that if a man could make money through his own means then its only fair for him to have the authority to choose what to do that hard earned money. The right to be in charge of one’s own finances has the possibility of society beneficting as a whole. Smith’s outlook on financial liberties delineates a commmon goal of the Enlightenment thinkers. It can be argued that aocial equality was the main idea of Mary Wollestonecraft’s discussion of women because she writes, “free them from all resraint by allowing them to participate in the inherit rights of mankind” (Doc D). Wollestonecraft wants women to access the same oppurnties as men. Equal educational oppurnity is important because it guides women through the sexist world that goes against them;