HY 150 BISK
EUROPE’S OLD REGIME: 1650-1798
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/hy150biskscience.htm
The crucial goal of all my courses is to create an environment where you, as
the student, can begin to feel comfortable taking responsibility for your own
education
"Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." When Lord Acton, the
great English historian of liberty, conceived this celebrated dictum, he had in
mind rulers like Louis XIV, whose statecraft tended toward absolutism, or the
unrestricted exercise of power. It is difficult to define corruption and to
apply the definition to a person as complex as this seventeenth-century French
monarch. Nevertheless, his contemporaries, as well as modern historians, would
probably agree that Louis XIV pursued power single-mindedly for the joy of
exercising it and for the glory it brought.
His political prudence failed him, however, as he mismatched French resources to
the goals that he sought—most likely a French frontier on the Rhine and French
dominance in Europe. He also miscalculated how the balance of power worked in
Europe. Led by England and the Dutch Republic, the enemies of the French king
coalesced ever more effectively against him as they felt that his policies
threatened them all. Although Louis XIV gained Franche-Comté, Strasbourg, and a
few other small northeastern territories for the French state, he left it with a
cumbersome and costly administration, an enormous debt, and a peasantry burdened
with heavy taxes.
The balance of power that checked Louis XIV’s ambitions of Louis XIV lasted
throughout the eighteenth century. While Poland and other antiquated great
states declined, new powers such as Russia and Prussia emerged and the Habsburg
monarchy regrouped and revived. Because of the fragile and often changing
relations among the major powers, Europe endured several decades of almost
constant diplomatic intrigue and military conflict.
Economically, European peoples had made some progress since the end of the
medieval period. But the unevenly shared benefits of improvements came slowly.
The Thirty Years’ War and other similar great religious conflicts, with frequent
famines and plagues, prevented any general improvement in the European standard
of living. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) ushered in a long period of peace during
which the European economy began a remarkable upswing. Europe’s trade with its
colonies, as well as with other African and Asian countries, increased
dramatically. Capital accumulated for investment in agriculture and industry. As
economic conditions improved, population increased rapidly in the countryside as
well as in the cities. A newly emerging urban middle class garnered a
disproportionate share of the wealth produced by the growth of capitalistic
ventures in agriculture, commerce, and industry. The upper classes, clergy and
aristocracy, who usually prospered less than did the middle class, clung
tenaciously to their privileges. Burdened with inefficient administrative
systems, European rulers confronted enormous economic problems and severe social
tensions.
In England and the Netherlands, economic growth and social changes helped set up
political systems unique from the trend toward absolutism elsewhere in Europe.
Although by no means truly democratic in character, the Dutch and English
created constitutional governments that limited the power of the monarchy and
protected the political and property rights of individuals. The economic and
cultural dynamism of the Netherlands far outlasted its brief ascendancy as a
major European power. After 1650, England eclipsed the Dutch and began building
its world empire. Both nations contributed to a new political paradigm—an
alternative to absolutism and the Old Regimes in Europe. By the late eighteenth
century, the ideals of constitutional government and individual rights forged by
the Dutch and the English provided the theoretical basis for the revolutionary
movements in colonial America and France.
McNEILL
THE HUMAN COMMUNITY
CHAPTER 18:
EUROPE’S OLD REGIME: 1650-1798
Introduction (447)
Social and Economic Changes (447)
Population Growth (448)
The Agricultural Revolution (448)
Significance of Agricultural Advances (449)
Trade and Finance (449)
The Idea of a National Debt (450)
Techniques of Manufacture (450)
New Sources of Power (451)
Precision Tools and Luxury Crafts (451)
Territorial Expansion (452)
The Eastward Movement in Eurasia (452)
Characteristics of Frontier Society (454)
POLITICS AND WAR (454)
French Territorial expansion (454)
British Territorial Expansion (458)
Eastern European Expansion (458)
Russian Agricultural Expansion (458)
The Western Ways of Peter the Great (460)
The Greatness of Russia Under Catherine (460)
Austrian Expansion (461)
Prussian Expansion (461)
Maria Theresa and the Hungarian Diet (462)
NEW CHALLENGES TO ROYAL ABSOLUTISM (462)
France (462)
England (463)
EUROPEAN CULTURE (464)
Natural Science (465)
The Newtonian Era (467)
Social Theory (468)
Philosophy and Literature (469)
Art and Music (470)
Religion and the Churches (472)
CONCLUSION (473)
BIBLIOGRAPHY (473)
DEVELOPMENT OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION (475)
For more on the 18th century see:
The Age of Enlightenment in the Paintings
of France’s National Museums
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/lumiere/documents/files/imaginary_exhibition.html
Paintings and text.
International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
http://www.c18.org/
More by Jack Lynch. Great resource.
Jack Lynch’s Home Page
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/
Huge resource on the 18th century.
Eighteenth-Century Resources
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/18th/
Still more by Jack Lynch.
Eighteenth-Century E-Texts
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/18th/etext.html
Jack Lynch, again. Wonderful links.
Eighteenth-Century Resources—History
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/18th/history.html
More Jack Lynch—this guy love’s the 18th century. Great links.
Electronic Texts
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jlynch/e-text.html
Variety of texts covering several centuries and several cultural areas.
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
The Age of Reason is a commonly accepted term
for the period of Western culture encompassing most of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The term aptly expresses a shift of emphasis away from the
Reformation’s hotly debated theological issues of salvation and sacraments to
new questions about the physical universe and the human community. "Age of
Reason" even more fittingly suggests a significant change in the educated
person’s approach to exploring or discussing intellectual matters. Scholars of
the Age of Reason rejected turning to Holy Scripture, church fathers, and other
authoritative expressions of Christian faith. They, instead, perfected methods
of thinking they believed would enable human reason to grasp truth without any
help from religion. Enthused by that belief, Galileo and other scientists not
only threw a brilliant light on previously unknown areas of physical and human
nature, they also overturned a great many traditional assumptions. By the middle
of the eighteenth century, it was clear that the intellectual basis of
established state churches, divine-right monarchies, and other fundamental
institutions of the Old Regime had eroded.
The new focus on nature and man plus the new scientific methods of reasoning
characterizing the Age of Reason rested on the unproved assumptions that
existence is intelligible and that human reason is adequate to the task of
understanding existence. Asserting that these assumptions were self-evident
meant professing a new faith—rationalism. This new, secular faith dominated
thinking in the Age of Reason until near the end of the eighteenth century. Then
David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and other philosophers, plus the revival of
traditional Christian perspective put Reason’s assumptions in doubt by
rigorously applying Reason’s own methods.
INTRODUCTION
Following the Renaissance, the rise of Humanism, and the Protestant Reformation
and Catholic Counter-Reformation, the next big change that marked the break from
the Medieval to the Modern period was the development of science. During the
16th and 17th centuries, Westerners broke with the medieval view of the universe
and laid the foundations of modern science.
MEDIEVAL THINKING
For a long time, people had accepted, as true, statements by the Church Fathers
or other great authorities, like Aristotle, and had used these statements as
premises in logical syllogisms to arrive at strange conclusions. Medieval
thinkers had integrated the cosmology of Aristotle and Ptolemy into a Christian
framework that drew a sharp distinction between the heavens beyond the moon and
an earthly realm.
1. Divine ether composed the celestial bodies. Divine ether was too pure, too
spiritual to exist on earth;
2. Heavenly bodies, unlike those on earth, were immune to any change and obeyed
laws of motion different from those that govern earthly bodies. Circular motion
in heaven and straight-line motion on earth.
3. The universe was not homogeneous. There was a higher world of the heavens
and a lower world of earth.
4. Earth could not compare with the heavens in spiritual dignity; nevertheless,
God had placed the earth in the center of the universe.
5. Earth deserved this position of importance because only here God and humanity
perform the drama of salvation.
Obviously these conclusions directly contradicted what the senses can observe in
nature and were of little use to architects, engineers, mathematicians, or
military men concerned with material things. Clearly, those dealing with this
world needed knowledge based on actual observations, on regularities derived
from controlled experiments, and, wherever possible, on mathematical proof.
They needed science,, which comes from the Latin word, scire, to know.
They had to be able to identify events in sequence, to analyze
interrelationships among these events, and to discover why and how they occurred
in a given order.
Once humans had taken this attitude toward the real world, they were on their
way toward mastering the physical environment. Economic growth, which was part
and parcel of humanity’s domination over the environment, came to be a necessity
in becoming more civilized.
MAJOR THEMES: MEDIEVAL SCIENCE VS. MODERN SCIENCE
1. Ancient approaches formed the basis of most scientific advance. But magic
played a crucial role at the beginning; the great breakthroughs were by those
who made great accomplishments without necessarily being aware of the
significances of their advances.
2. Medieval science was teleological—that is, nature has a purpose. Medieval
scientists had tried to find out why things were as they were; they tried to
understand. Modern science makes progress by ignoring the why and concentrating
on describing the how.
3. Medieval science was qualitative, value-rich: good and bad, beautiful and
ugly, heavenly and earthly. Nature is full of symbols. Modern science is at
bottom a combination of 1) math (weight, measure and count), 2) mechanics
(universality of matter in motion), and 3) empiricism (the experimental method).
It tries to be value-free. Nature is meaningless.
4. Religion dominated medieval science. God reveals Divine Law to mankind.
Authority is from God, and God is the absolute other. Modern science, on the
other hand, is independent of religion. Humans discover Natural Law. Authority
is from nature, and nature is objectively independent.
5. Medieval science nature is static and stable. Rest is the preferable state.
The permanent is knowable. For Modern Science nature is dynamic and moving.
Motion is describable. Modern science is the passionate search for order.
6. Medieval science was anthropomorphic and earth-centered, and stressed free
will. Modern science is dehumanized, deterministic, and describes an infinite
universe.
7. Medieval Science was organic. It provided for multiple levels of reality and
was rational and logical. Modern science is alienating. It is empirical and
instrumental.
8. The Scientific Revolution ultimately weakened traditional Christianity.
Christian teachings came under attack as contrary to the standards of proof
postulated by the new science. Theology seemed to be an irrelevant area of
intellectual inquiry. Elite culture came to scorn various widespread and popular
beliefs including magic, witchcraft, and astrology.
NOTES
1. Syllogism: formal deductive argument consisting of a major premise
plus a minor premise and a conclusion. Also, subtle, specious, or crafty
argument.
2. Cosmology: branch of astronomy dealing with the origin, structure, and
space-time relationships of the universe.
3. The ancient Greeks had first begun to use speculative reason to explain the
nature of things and thereby marked a major turning point in human intellectual
development. Mankind has not forgotten the Greek idea of a universe ruled not by
the whim of some divine personality but by an impersonal and unchangeable Natural
Law. Throughout the following history of European thought, this
distinctively Greek view of the nature of things stood in persistent and
fruitful tension with the older, Middle Eastern theistic explanation of the
universe. Particular thinkers, reluctant to abandon completely either position,
have sought to reconcile the omnipotence of the divine will with the
unchangeability of natural law through various arguments. Because, however, the
two views are logically incompatible with each other, no formulation or
reconciliation ever has won lasting and universal consent.
JOURNAL 2 QUESTIONS
Read the material above and McNeill, The
Human Community: Europe’s Old Regime: 1650-1789. Please answer the following
questions in your journal.
1. The belief in Natural Law and Science is one of the hallmarks of modern
civilization. Define the concept of Natural Law. How does modern scientific
thinking differ from pre-modern ways of thinking?
2. Describe the mutual
interaction between society and its beliefs on the one hand and scientific
thought on the other.
3. How was "science" the foundation of the Enlightenment? In other words, how
did Newton affect the way the French philosophes and other Enlightenment figures
think about society? How did the Enlightenment challenge religion?
4. Describe the nature of European culture during the Enlightenment.
Return to HY 150 Bisk