2Enthusiasm for knowledgeUnlike the unavailability of the knowledge of “dark”medieval times, Enlightenment era has brought in a new stream of information.Due to the fact that scientific explanation were no longer considered to beheretic, fields of many branches such as mathematics, physics, astronomy,politics, medicine etc.
were being drastically changed by gaining informationand expanding their study subjects. People were only happy and demanded new information,since it´s only in the nature of a human to be curious. The hypothesis could besupported by the behavior of people at that time and their attitude towards thenew & unknown.
The enthusiasm, with which was the period taken, couldbe seen on establishing intellectual saloons in France, philosophicaldiscussions that began to be held and books that started to be at the forefront.The more resources they had, the more information could they acquire. So thepopularity of literary books was increasing as people feverishly read books andpassed them around. 2.1 Even Rome wasn´t built in a dayHowever, the knowledge stream wasn´t available foreveryone. Rural citizens, many uneducated but also common people weren´tgranted a chance unless they had sufficient amount of finances. But everythingstarted to get better, when the Age of Enlightenment prompted the IndustrialRevolution, which offered common people jobs and new cities to live in.
3Influence of Age of EnlightenmentKnowledge forms the personality and this can be evenobserved on the fact that Enlightenment movement transformed the “Wild West”into sophisticated, intelligent and self-aware civilisation. Moreover, itinspired and helped the creation of world´s first great democracy, the UnitedStates of America. 3.1 Abuse of the periodBut not all of the followers of the movement weresupporting the democracy means.
Mainly the leaders of a few chosen countrieshave despised the democracy. They stated that the king appropriate for leadingthe country properly has to be enlightened, reasonable and has to rule withjustice. The attributes they were describing could be simply summarized byexpression “philosopher-king”. However, what theytruly intended was to meet with the leaders of the Enlightenment movement, whowould then help these “enlightened despots” to design laws and program by whatthey would reform the system in order to build more powerful and strongerstates. To the group of leaders with this goal belonged Frederick the Great ofPrussia, Catherine the Great of Russia, Leopold II.
of Tuscany and Joseph II.of Austria.
