Chapter 19: New Worldviews and Ways of Life (1540-1790)

cottage industry

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

law of universal gravitation

Newton's law thal 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.

Haskalah

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

general will

A concept associated with Rousseau, referring to the common interests of all the people, who have replaced the power of the monarch.

philisophes

A group of French intellectuals who proclaimed that they were bringing the light of knowledge to their fellow creatures in the Age of Enlightenment.

law of inertia

A law formulated by Galileo that states 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.

empiricism

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

sensationalism

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

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.

Enlightenment

An intellectual and cultural movement in late seventeeth-and eighteenth-century Europe and its colonies that used rational and critical thinking to debate issues such as political sovereignty, religious tolerance, gender roles, and radical difference.

deism

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

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.

enlightened absolutism

Term coined by historians to describe the rule of eighteenth-century monarchs who, without renouncing their own absolute authority, adopted Enlightenment ideals of rationalism, progress, and tolerance.

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.

Copernican hypothesis

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

economic liberalism

The theory, associated with Adam Smith, that the pursuit of self-interest in a competitive market suffices to improve living conditions, rendering government intervention unnecessary and undesirable.