The Enlightenment era, sometimes referred to as the Age of Enlightenment was a movement created during the late 17 th and 18 th centuries. This movement emphasized values such as universality, skepticism, individualism and reason among others. The enlightenment thinkers acted as the liberals of this period. Typically, they were humanists who advocated for human dignity and equality. They were greatly opposed to bigotry, superstition, intolerance and supernatural occurrences.
The enlightenment era was characterized by numerous values that contradicted the reality. One was universality. The enlightenment thinkers insisted that human beings possess universal rights, which belong to them, simply by virtue of them being human beings rather than because they are part of a certain religious denomination or social group. This means that the world is rational and progress does not occur automatically. Given that all societies develop by going through particular stages of growth, then, the human beings that constitute these societies must share common faculties. Of all the shared faculties, reason is the most important.
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The value of universality meant that all human beings throughout the world shared equal rights. Sadly, this was not the case in real life because the rights were normally restricted based on social class. Modern day scholars argue that the concept of Enlightenment democracy has been gravely corrupted. Revolutionaries of the 17 th and 18 th centuries never referred to democracy as the rule of elected officials who were occasionally accountable to the larger population. Also, these revolutionaries, including their predecessors, never believed that democracy involved the rule of all by all. Baruch Spinoza serves as a perfect example in this case. Spinoza was Jewish philosopher who was widely acknowledged for laying the foundations for the Enlightenment and biblical criticism, including the conceptions of the universe. Certainly, this thinker wrote countless passages in which he acclaimed democracy as the most appropriate method of governing. However, he opposed the idea that democracy was meant for everyone. For instance, he argued that the masses could never be guided by reason.
