Walter Hinteler wrote:
This statement puzzles me a than a bit - until now I've thaught that the French «Siècle De Lumières» and the German "Aufklärung" were translated into English as "Age of the Enlightened".
Or simply "The Enlightenment" Certainly thinkers and writers from all over Western Europe contributed to it. However there were two distinct branches to it with detectably different emphasis in their ideas and writings.
The first, the French/German Enlightenment, began among others with Montaigne and later the Encyclopedists, particularly Diderot, and as well the works of Pascal, Descartes, Rosseau and Voltaire.
The second in England and Scotland was principally represented by the works of John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and even Edward Gibbon, author of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Among the French (perhaps excluding Pascal) there was a relatively greater emphasis on pure reason and more abstract conceptions. The English/Scottish Enlightemnment emphasized more concrete features of life and also concepts of personal virtue in social affairs that permeated the writings if its principals. The founding fathers of the American revolution were most influenced by the English Enlightenment; those of thee French Revolution, their own. The different results speak for themselves.
Quote:When you name from Germany the Great, you certainly can't forget the others like , Lessing, Kant., Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Mendelssohn ... etc who all are in the same group of "outstanding examples of the Enlightenement as others.
You are correct and omitting them was an error on my part.
Quote:Your naming of Catherine the Great and Napoleon as belonging to this period/group is a bit ... unusual.
Not at all. Catherine and Friedrich with whom she corresponded, and later on Napoleon were all intellectual consumers and admirers of Enlightenment thought, particularly the French/German branch. At the same time all were tyrants who did not practice the ideas they embraced on an abstract level. They were aristocratic hypocrites.
