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Unit 4
10–15% of examThis unit follows how new ways of studying nature, with observation, experiments and math, led thinkers to use reason on everything else: government, religion, the economy and society. You'll also see how better farming let Europe's population grow, how art and reading habits changed, and how some monarchs borrowed Enlightenment ideas while keeping their power.
Longer videos that cover the whole unit. Good for a first pass or a final review.
The Renaissance revival of ancient texts, the printing press, voyages that found lands the ancient writers never knew, and the Reformation's challenge to church authority all made Europeans more willing to question what they had been taught. That set the stage for new thinking about nature and then about society.
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From the 1500s to the late 1600s, thinkers rebuilt how Europeans understood the universe and the body. Copernicus put the sun at the center, Kepler showed planets move in ellipses, Galileo used a telescope and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633, Newton's Principia (1687) explained motion and gravity with a few mathematical laws, and William Harvey showed that the heart pumps blood around the body, challenging the ancient doctor Galen. Bacon pushed learning from experiments (empiricism), while Descartes stressed logical reasoning (rationalism).
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In the 1700s, writers called philosophes, like Voltaire and Diderot, used reason to question churches, kings and old customs, and many became deists, who believed God created the universe and then let it run by natural laws. Building on John Locke's ideas of natural rights and government by consent, Montesquieu called for separating government powers and Rousseau wrote about the social contract, though Rousseau wanted women kept out of politics, a view Mary Wollstonecraft attacked. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776) argued for free trade and free markets instead of mercantilism.
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Better farming and transport ended most famines, plague disappeared, and inoculation cut deaths from smallpox, so Europe's population grew steadily in the 1700s. Late marriage (the European marriage pattern) kept families smaller, parents put more time and money into children as fewer died young, and people moved to growing cities, where poverty and crime became visible problems.
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Art moved from the playful, decorative Rococo style (Fragonard's The Swing) to Neoclassicism, which copied ancient Greece and Rome to celebrate duty and virtue (David's Oath of the Horatii, 1784). More people could read, so novels, newspapers and pamphlets spread, and ideas were debated in salons, coffeehouses and reading societies.
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Some absolute monarchs, called enlightened absolutists, adopted reforms inspired by the philosophes without giving up power. Frederick the Great of Prussia allowed religious toleration and reformed the law, Joseph II of Austria ended serfdom and granted toleration (though much was undone after he died), and Catherine the Great of Russia praised Enlightenment ideas but tightened serfdom after Pugachev's Rebellion. Prussia rose to become a great power, and by 1800 most states in western and central Europe tolerated Christian minorities, and some gave Jews equal civil rights.
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This wrap-up topic asks you to connect causes and effects across the unit: how the success of the scientific method led thinkers to look for natural laws of society, and how Enlightenment ideas about rights and reason fed reform and, later, revolution. Practice telling apart long-term causes from immediate triggers.
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