A History of the Modern World, 9/e

R R Palmer, Yale University
Joel Colton, Duke University
Lloyd Kramer, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

The Age of Enlightenment

Learning Objectives

Chapter 8 teaches students about:

The enduring impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions, cultural movements, and intellectual debates.

The dominance of the idea of progress and the countervailing tendencies of religious fervor in the eighteenth century.

The role of the philosophes and physiocrats, their influence on an expanding reading public, and the centrality of Paris in the Enlightenment.

Enlightened despotism, its secularism, rationality, and reformism.

The successes and failures of enlightened despotism in France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia.

The wave of revolutionary activity that commenced in the late eighteenth century and continued until the mid-nineteenth century.

The middle-class, or bourgeois, nature of the democratic revolutions.

The reform movement in Britain and the push by Parliament to centralize the empire.

The American Revolution, the intervention of European powers in the conflict, and the limited advances of democracy and equality in the new states.

The inspiration that the American Revolution provided, as well as its vindication of Enlightenment ideals.

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