Leviathan By Thomas Hobbes: The Age Of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was a period in the eighteenth century that changed philosophy and cultural life and took place in Europe. The movement started in France, then spread to Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and made its way to Germany. It was a way of thinking, that focused on the improvement of humanity by using logic and reason rather than irrationality and superstition. This showed skepticism in the face of religion, challenged the inequality between the leaders and their people, and tried to establish a sound system of ethics.

Philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, projected a theory in his book called Leviathan. In this book, he claims that people will join a sound system of power to create rules that will help comfort

His ideas were opposing to the ideas of Hobbes. Since, they were completely opposite, Locke believed that human nature was good while Hobbes believed that human nature was bad. Hobbes argued that his idea was right, and that people should escape the horrible way of living. They had to give their rights away to a strong power and in return they got law and order. This was the social contract. Locke was completely against this and favored independence. According to Locke, “people are born free and equal with three natural rights which are: life, liberty, and propriety.” He believes that the purpose of government is to protect these rights.

The Enlightenment plays an important role in the justification for the movement known as modernism. It is a movement, including liberalism and neo-classicism which traces intellectual heritage back to the Enlightenment. This is held, to show the source of critical ideas such as the importance of freedom, democracy, and reason in a society. This view claims that the establishment of promised rights would lead to the market mechanism, capitalism, the scientific method, religious, racial tolerance, and the organization of states into sovereign republics through democratic

He is known as the founder of laissez-faire economic thought and policy. In his work, he examined the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, he then went further and determined how a nation’s united wealth grows. Smith then classifies characteristics of a growing economy. Some of his ideas were that division of labor increases production, monopolies and regulations stifle productive labor, and that there is an unlimited store of resources. He also believed that social and economic development had four stages. That four stages consisted of human society are hunting and gathering, pastoral or herding, agriculture, and commercial. He believed that humans could use the four-stage theory to understand what social and economic development a group of people was