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Humanistic and Economic Philosophies

If you have remained abreast of your readings you should all now be familiar with the writings of Cardinal Richelieu, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire. Each of these individuals was greatly impacted by the Renaissance and the new way of thinking about man, science and government that it prompted. Each of these philosophers had an influential effect on the new way of thinking that led to the Enlightenment. Hobbes, Smith and Locke in particular would be very influential on the course of the American revolutionary period and the subsequent establishment of a constitutional republic in the United States.

Richelieu was the most important councilor to two French kings and he subordinated his role as a Cardinal of the Church to his position as a Frenchman advising the monarch. Hobbes was a child of unrest in England and it influenced his philosophy that man must be governed because left to his natural devices, his life would be “nasty, brutish and short”. Hobbes did advance the notion of the social contract, allowing that man must be governed but the governing must be benevolent. John Locke is the most frequently cited influence upon the American Founding Fathers. He rejected the pessimism of Hobbes and felt that man must be allowed to construct his own government, and if government became oppressive of his freedom, then man was obligated to overthrow the source of the oppression. He was a close friend of Adam Smith who for his part advanced the arguments of free markets over the then extant mercantilist system employed by the great European powers. Rousseau and Voltaire would prove to be the most important of many French Enlightenment thinkers who debated the nature of inequality.

Describe the major points of each philosopher’s essays. Compare and contrast the works of Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau and Voltaire. Describe the effects of these philosophers on governments of the time. How did the spread of these ideas inaugurate the period known as the Enlightenment?