Reason Against the Society of Orders: How the Enlightenment Undermined What It Did Not Attack

The idea

The exam's fourth band asks what Enlightenment thought was, what enlightened despotism did, and how Poland was partitioned, and the anchor's answer joins the three: a movement that meant to reform monarchy strengthened some monarchs and dissolved the ground under all of them. The thought came from Newton. If nature ran on rational laws, so must human nature, and the philosophes set out to find the laws of learning, government and wealth. Locke found consent and the blank slate; Montesquieu, whom the witness supplies, found the separation of powers; Voltaire found wit against superstition and injustice; Hume found passion and no miracles; Smith found the invisible hand; Rousseau found the general will. A reading public, coffee houses, salons run by women, the Encyclopédie from seventeen fifty-one and a smugglers' underground carried the ideas to a glassworker. Their politics stayed muted. Censorship forced pseudonyms, the philosophes distrusted commoners, and almost none rejected monarchy; they wanted an enlightened king under reasonable laws. The despots obliged on their own terms. Frederick hosted Voltaire, freed serfs on royal lands and staffed his bureaucracy by examination; Catherine corresponded, reorganized and schooled girls at Smolny; Joseph, on the witness, freed the serfs outright in seventeen eighty-one and saw the landlords undo it. Beccaria's program ended torture. None surrendered power, and the same three despots carved up Poland in seventeen seventy-two, ninety-three and ninety-five, the middle date the witness's, because an elective monarchy with a paralyzed diet could not defend itself against neighbors who had read the same books. The disruption came anyway. Once a king's legitimacy rested on prosperity and fair laws, his subjects could judge him; once privilege had to be deserved, nobles had to justify it; once revealed religion was dismissed, the First Estate lost its ground. Rights of man became abolitionism, and Wollstonecraft in seventeen ninety-two demanded them for women. The philosophes did not attack the society of orders. They removed the reasons for it, and in seventeen eighty-nine unit 07's France found there were none left.