Chapter 19: Vocab

public sphere

An idealized intellectual space that emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment. Here, the public came together to discuss important social, economic, and political issues.

Haskalah

A Jewish Enlightenment movement led by the Prussian philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

enlightened absolutism

Term coined by historians to describe the rule of eighteenth-century monarchs who, without renouncing their own absolute authority, took up the call to reform their governments in accordance with the rational and humane principles of the Enlightenment.

economic liberalism

The theory, associated with Adam Smith, that the pursuit of individual self-interest in a competitive market would lead to rising prosperity and greater social equality, rendering government intervention unnecessary and undesirable.

Enlightenment

An intellectual and cultural movement in late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and the wider world that used rational and critical thinking to debate issues such as political sovereignty, religious tolerance, gender roles, and racial differences.

empiricism

a theory of inductive reasoning that calls for acquiring evidence through observation and experimentation rather than reason and speculation.

philosophes

A group of French intellectuals who proclaimed that they were bringing the light of knowledge to their fellow humans.

deism

Belief in a distant, noninterventionist deity, shared by many Enlightenment thinkers.

cottage industry

Manufacturing with hand tools in peasant cottages and work sheds, a form of economic activity that became important in eighteenth-century Europe.

salons

Regular social gatherings held by talented and rich Parisian women in their homes, where philosophes and their followers met to discuss literature, science, and philosophy.

enclosure

The controversial process of fencing off common land to create privately owned fields that increased agricultural production at the cost of reducing poor farmers' access to land.

general will

a concept associated with Rousseau, referring to the common interests of all the people, who have displaced the monarch as the holder of sovereign power.

law of inertia

a law formulated by Galileo starting that motion, not rest, is the natural state of an object and that an object continues in motion forever unless stopped by some external force.

sensationalism

an idea, espoused by John Locke, that all human ideas and thoughts are produced as a result of sensory impressions

law of universal gravitation

newton's law that all objects are attracted to one another and that the force of attraction is proportional to the object's quantity of matter and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

Copernican hypothesis

the idea that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe.