Title: Enlightened Governments, their Conflicts and their Critics, 1763–1789
Abstract: The consequences of the Seven Years War and of later conflicts were of considerable importance, since both those who did well out of them and those who did not were obliged to examine the degree to which their systems of government matched up to the demands of the times. To an extent greater than ever before, politicians from Lisbon to St Petersburg were persuaded to have recourse to ideas being put forward by a wide variety of thinkers in the vast and many-sided intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment, which we will examine more broadly in the next chapter. The outstanding examples of such adoption were made by those monarchs who became known as enlightened despots or absolutists — Catherine II (the Great) of Russia, Frederick II (the Great) of Prussia and Joseph II of Austria (remarkable enough if never dubbed the Great). The Enlightenment also exerted its influence on a number of statesmen in Europe as well as crossing the Atlantic to the British mainland colonies in particular. There, ideas both new and old were used to assert the independence of the United States of America in 1776. Later, they were employed at the beginning of an even greater upset, the French Revolution of 1789. To trace the manner in which the Enlightenment was used to support monarchy as well as to overthrow it will be a major purpose of this chapter.
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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