Topics for final exam

American Enlightenment

In the 18^th century in England, as in other European countries, there sprang into life a public movement known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, on the whole, was an expression of struggle of the the progressive class of bourgeoisie against feudalism. The Enlighteners fought against class inequality, prejudices and other survivals of feudalism. They attempted to place all branched of science at the service of mankind by connecting them with the actual needs and requirements of people. The problem of men comes to the fore superseding all other problems in literature. The Enlighteners prove that man is born kind and honest and if he becomes depraved, it is only due to the influence of corrupted social environment. Fighting the survivals of feudalism, the enlighteners at the same time were prone to accept bourgeois relationships as rightful and reasonable relationships among people. The English writers of the time formed two groups. The first – hoped to better the world simply by teaching (Defoe). The other – openly protested against the vicious social order (Swift, Fielding, Sheridan, Burns). The Enlightenment as an intellectual project represents a very complex, multi-layered subject, not only in the intellectual sphere1 , but in the political, cultural, social and economic spheres as well, and the complexity and magnitude of the subject produced a variety of approaches in dealing with it. Some of the approaches tend to emulate the narrative which the intellectuals of the Enlightenment created themselves, presenting the Enlightenment as being a consequence of new scientific discoveries in the 17th and 18th centuries, or as being the “natural” progress of human history. Others, as for example Jonathan Israel in his A revolution of the mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy, talk of the dichotomy between the “radical” and “moderate” Enlightenments in terms of the scope of civil liberties which they proposed respectively; some say the Enlightenment project is to be blamed for all the disasters humanity suffered during the 20th century due to its instrumental rationality and emphasis on scientific progress (Horkheimer and Adorno in their famous Dialectic of Enlightenment); some postmodern historical accounts, on the other hand, tend to criticize universalism as a prominent characteristic of the Enlightenment, blaming those values “for the destructive effects we should be ascribing to capitalism” (Wood, The Origin of Capitalism 190). These various approaches focus on different aspects of the Enlightenment, depending on the political or ideological orientations of particular authors

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