4.7 Causation in the Age of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment

• Long-term causes: the Renaissance, printing, exploration and the Reformation weakened trust in ancient and Church authority.
• The Scientific Revolution showed that observation, experiment and math could explain nature with simple laws, from Copernicus in 1543 to Newton in 1687.
• Enlightenment thinkers applied those methods to people and governments, arguing for natural rights, toleration, separation of powers and free markets.
• Print culture, salons and coffeehouses spread these ideas to a growing reading public.
• Effects: reforms by enlightened absolutists, new public opinion, and ideas that later inspired revolutions in America and France.

A long-term cause builds up conditions over decades. A trigger, or proximate cause, is the immediate event that sets something off. For example, Enlightenment ideas about consent of the governed were a long-term cause of the French Revolution. France's bankruptcy and the calling of the Estates-General in 1789 were the triggers (see 5.4). Strong essays say which is which and how they combined.

Some effects were reforms within the existing order: Frederick the Great's toleration and legal reform, Joseph II's Patent of Toleration, and Beccaria's influence on ending torture. Others were challenges to the order: Locke's right of revolution and Rousseau's general will gave language to revolutionaries.

There were limits and unintended effects too. Enlightenment thinkers rarely included women, the poor or enslaved people in their ideas of rights. Yet critics like Mary Wollstonecraft and, later, enslaved revolutionaries in Haiti turned the language of universal rights against those exclusions (see 5.5). That's a good example of an unintended consequence.

Not everything changed. Most Europeans remained religious, absolute monarchy remained the most common form of government, and serfdom persisted in the east. Folk beliefs, astrology and alchemy survived. Showing these continuities next to the changes demonstrates complexity.

Short-answer and document questions often hand you one piece of the chain, such as a passage from a philosophe or an image of a salon. Ask what came before it that made it possible and what it led to. A salon painting, for example, shows how ideas spread, so you can link it backward to the rise of print and literacy and forward to public pressure on governments.