This entry consists of four separate articles: Enlightenment Thought, The French Revolution, Mary Woll-stonecraft, and Napoleon and Napoleonic Rule.
The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement in eighteenth-century Europe that influenced the American Revolution and helped shape American political institutions. Enlightenment authors addressed religion, politics, and economics and were diverse in their writings and nationalities. The Frenchman Voltaire wrote literature and advocated religious and political liberty in his Philosophical Letters (1734). The Scotsman David Hume wrote history and encouraged political and commercial liberty in his Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (1753). The Englishman Richard Price wrote moral philosophy and the political essays Two Tracts on Civil Liberty (1778).
Although diverse, Enlightened writers shared a scientific outlook that influenced the development of American political institutions. Enlightened authors applied the scientific methods of observation and experimentation to study human beings and their social activities. Although not widely employed until after 1730, this scientific method of social thought developed from the scientific revolution of the 1600s. During the seventeenth century, scientists such as Isaac Newton (1642-1727) argued that the physical universe was orderly because it functioned according to natural laws. Newton maintained that through observation and experimentation, scientists could discover these natural laws that governed the physical world. In the 1700s, Enlightened thinkers applied these scientific ways of thinking to the study of human nature and human society. They used the scientific method of observation to study human nature and called this study the "science of man." They believed their scientific studies would reveal natural laws of human behavior that governed social activities such as religion, economics, and politics. They referred to the study of these natural laws as the "science of politics."
One such natural law was self-preservation. Enlightenment writers believed that the pursuit of selfpreservation was ingrained in human nature. The Englishman John Locke (1632-1704) maintained that the law of self-preservation also included liberty and property. He argued that individuals possess natural liberty to pursue their own preservation, and he maintained that individuals use liberty to acquire property as the material means of preservation. Because these means of preservation—liberty and property—were grounded in human nature, Locke identified them as rights of human nature. He called them "natural rights." Locke defined the purpose of govemment as the protection of these rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. Locke's influence was evident in the American Declaration of Independence, which defined the purpose of government as the protection of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Locke's ideas were only part of the Enlightenment that influenced American politics. Two other important groups of Enlightenment thinkers were the French philosophes and the Scottish common-sense philosophers. The most influential French philosophe in America was Baron de Montesquieu. In 1748 Montesquieu published The Spirit of the Laws. Therein, he explicitly wrote about the "science of politics." By this he meant the study of how political laws affected the natural laws of human behavior. Commerce was one example. Montesquieu argued that politics could constructively channel the pursuit of self-preservation and property by encouraging commerce and promoting the virtues of labor and diligence that accompanied commerce.
Montesquieu also emphasized the separation of powers. He argued that the natural law of selfpreservation required protection against, as well as encouragement of, government because the powers of government could be abused. Such powers could threaten personal security through policies of religious intolerance or arbitrary taxation. Thus, Montesquieu sought to create political institutions that governed effectively but were limited in power. He suggested separating the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of government. Each separate power, he hoped, would limit the power of the other two. American Revolutionary leaders followed Montesquieu's advice by writing the separation of powers into their state and national constitutions. John Adams particularly praised the achievement of separation in his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States (1787-1788).
Americans understood the separation of powers in tandem with the ideas of Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume argued that the pursuit of selfpreservation often kindled ambition as humans sought property and power beyond mere personal security. Similar to Montesquieu, Hume viewed ambition as constructive in commerce. Yet Hume feared ambition in politics. He maintained that ambitious people often formed factions or small groups that pursued private interests in politics, not public good.
Hume and his American readers sought to limit the effects of faction. They viewed the separation of powers as achieving this end by ensuring that each of the three powers counterbalanced the ambitions and factions in the other two. The American Revolutionary James Madison expressed this view in Federalist No. 51 (1788). He defended the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution by explaining that "ambition must be made to counteract ambition."
In addition to Montesquieu and Hume, Americans also read Scottish common-sense philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) and Thomas Reid (1710-1796). Hutcheson and Reid argued that all human beings possessed a common moral sense by which they distinguish virtue from vice. They proposed this common moral sense in opposition to eighteenth-century skeptics. Skeptics doubted whether the scientific study of human nature could establish fixed moral rules for human behavior. Hutcheson and Reid insisted that it could. They maintained that the human mind possessed a moral sense that naturally approved of virtues such as self-love and benevolence and disapproved of corresponding vices. Hutcheson explained this moral sense in his System of Moral Philosophy (1755) and Reid in his Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (1764).
Many Americans appealed to moral-sense theory to establish common moral ground within their religiously diverse and tolerant society. Such theory became a prominent part of American education and law after the Revolution. The president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University), Samuel Stanhope Smith (1751-1819), appealed to moral sense in his Lectures on Moral and Political Philosophy (1812). Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story (17791845) made similar appeals to moral sense in his Commentaries on the Constitution (1833). Thus, moral-sense theory helped Americans combine different elements of Enlightenment thought into a coherent social philosophy. With it, Americans balanced ambition in commerce and politics with agreed-upon social virtues in education, culture, and law.