What is "The Age of the Enlightenment"?

We’ll spend the next three or four weeks answering this question, but to get us started:

In general terms, "The Age of the Enlightenment" refers to the period between around 1650 and the French Revolution (1789) (others end the era at 1798: the year Coleridge and Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads), during which time Western Civilization saw an explosion in:

1)  The application of scientific reasoning to, well, everything (yes, everything)

2) The birth of republican democracy in North America and Western Europe

3) The application of religious tolerance to political systems

4) The seeds of social equality in political systems.

We're interested in how these four qualities seem to be inherently linked, not only historically, but perhaps logically, to one another, and how these in turn shape the literature of this era. Understanding these connections is our main task for this section.

The term "Enlightenment" was coined by the major proponents of the movement itself, as a part of their claim that educating people in the ways of scientific reasoning would end all of humanities' ills: rationality could explain all natural phenomena, including those of mankind, and could be used to govern everything, including mankind. Reason would "light the way" toward a new, utopian golden age in which people were radically more free, equal and happy.  The other movements we’ll cover in this course (Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism) challenge this assumption.

The Enlightenment is also commonly termed "Neo-Classical" as it builds its philosophical, political and aesthetic values from rediscovered Greek (500-146 BC) (and to a degree Roman Republican (510-31 BC)) models. In this way, the Enlightenment is an outgrowth of the Neo-Classical Renaissance and Scientific Revolution.

We'll also discuss how this "Enlightenment" refers to the waning of Plato's nearly 2,000 year-long dominance, especially under the influence of Medieval Christian conceptions of knowledge, and the rise of Aristotelean thinking.  See: Plato vs. Aristotle

The American Declaration of Independence and Constitution are widely considered the crowning glory of Enlightenment era, and although we could say we still live in this age (we still embrace many of its values and beliefs), its immense optimism was tempered by the atrocities following the French Revolution (1789-1799).