ocke‘s Treatises have been attributed to the liberating ideals that the founders of our country based our representative government upon. He indulged in the idea of associative community come together to create a form of democratic self-ruling government. Jointly, sovereign individuals should implement positive government reigning over them. The American Revolution was greatly influenced by Locke’s idea of “natural rights.” It was these radical changes in thought caused by political leaders such as Locke that shaped nature of the Enlightenment.Other leaders followed Locke in cultivating new understandings of society. They came to be referred to as philosophes. The respected Denis Diderot created an Encyclopedia that defined a philosophe as “one who, ‘trampling on predudice, tradition, universal consent, authority, in a word all that enslaves most minds, dares to think for [himself and]… to admit nothing except the testimony of his experience and reason.’” (689) Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet), a prominent bourgeois philosophe, connected the characteristics of the Enlightenment to the scientific revolution through his publication of Elements of the Philosophy of Newton in 1738. He has been favored as a satirical playwright and noted for his revered work on the novel Candide written in 1759. He echoed the same quality of thought as John Locke. Voltaire posed that “no culture had a monopoly on beauty or value, just as no religion had a monopoly on truth.” (690) The philosophe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau from Geneva, offered a radical view on the origins of society. He believed that society was subject to the sin of possession and that property is the root of all evil. We find his solution in The Social Contract where Rousseau states that the common good of society should come first and individual private interest should always be subordinate to the focus on the collect...
