The Enlightenment and the Great Awakening

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Scientific Inquiry
The Scientific Revolution led to a fundamental shift in Western thought and drastically altered previous views of the universe. A modern scientific world-view worldemerged as a popular among the educated in the Western world. Benjamin Franklin was deeply interested in scientific inquiry. He invented the lightning rod, the glass harmonica, the Franklin stove, and bifocal glasses. Franklin established the American Philosophical Society to foster scientific discovery and the dissemination of ideas.
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Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine was a revolutionary, radical intellectual, and deist. Paine’s works drastically changed the political and social climate of the 18th century. During the Revolution, Paine joined the Continental Army. In response to English criticism of the French Revolution, Paine wrote “The Rights of Man” (1791-92). (1791Paine was the most successful pamphleteer of the Enlightenment.
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Adam Smith
Adam Smith was a Scottish moral philosopher. He was the leading pioneer in the science of political economics and the major influence on the development of a theory of capitalism. Smith was passionate about liberty, reason and free speech. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) was unquestionably Smith’s most lasting contribution to western thought and the Enlightenment.

Upper Classes
In the eighteenth-century, an eighteenthAmerican upper class had emerged and had begun to mimic their counterparts in England. This new socio-political elite sociowas built largely on the growing trans-Atlantic transcommerce. During this same period, however, ordinary Americans made increased demands for “English liberties” in the face of aristocratic privilege and power.
The Enlightenment and the Great Awakening
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John Locke
One of the great philosophers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. An Oxford scholar, medical researcher and physician, political operative, economist and ideologue According to Locke, we can know with certainty that God exists. We can also know about morality with the same precision we know about mathematics, because we are the creators of moral and political ideas. He gives us the theory of natural law and natural rights which he uses to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate civil governments.
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Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a Prussian scholar who left a lasting impact on the Romantic and Idealist philosophies of the 19th Century. Kant asserted that human beings have innate properties within their minds in order to make sense of the raw data delivered by the senses. Kant published his most important work in 1781, “the Critique of Pure Reason,” one of the most important books in the history of Western philosophy.
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Benjamin Franklin
Franklin's "" was one of the first serious studies of demography. Franklin held to a belief that no man in America needed to long remain a laborer for others. Despite the doubling of the population in every twenty years or so, America remained a land of opportunity, where wages remained high and even slaves were expensive. Franklin's essay uses sophisticated use of social science data to convince the British ministry to alter its colonial policies. Franklin also pleads that America be maintained as an entirely AngloAnglo-Saxon society.
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The Great Awakening
Started among Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It was a reaction against the formality of the established congregational churches. It led to the founding of a number of academies and colleges. It was the first common experience shared by large numbers of Americans and fostered the development of the American identity. The movement also led to a fissure within American Protestantism between traditionalists who insisted on ritual and doctrine and the new revivalists who stressed an intensely passionate commitment to religion.
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In 1705, Governor Joseph Dudley personified the reason many common Americans challenged established authority.
Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards was the most famous and influential of America’s revivalist theologians. Expressive of two ideas: the ultimate power and majesty of God God’s amazing holiness. Edwards synthesized traditional Protestantism with Newton’s physics, Locke’s psychology, Shaftsbury's aesthetics, and Malebranche’s moral philosophy. He led the fervid religious revivalist movement that was dubbed “the Great Awakening.”