DDave3 wrote:Did the Enlightenment usher in, and solidify, capitalism in Europe?
Usher in, no. The socio-economic developments of the time enabled capitalism to take over.
The Enlightenment did however provide the intellectual and moral justification for capitalism, hence making it attractive to the bourgeois class. When its philosophers postulated freedom, democracy, and reason, the bourgeoisie also understood these postulations in regard to the market. Many people don't know that before Adam Smith published Wealth of the Nations, he wrote Theory of Moral Sentiments, a treatise on human sympathy in which he set the moral basis for his following work on economics. It is by no means a coincidence that the classical school of economics arose in Britain in the late 18th century, David Hume and the physiocrats (François Quesnay and Anne Robert) in mid-18th century France already laid the framework for the popular demand for capitalism by promoting free trade and free land.
In conclusion, the Enlightenment played a crucial role in setting up the moral mindset necessary for the people to accept a new order of things.
- By Robert Urbanek
- By noemon
- By litwin