Impact of the Ideals of Enlightenment on Modern History
The ideals of the age of Enlightenment gave way to a number of cultural revolutions that took place in the United States and in Europe and strongly influenced the turn of historical events that formed the current state of matters. During this particular period of time a number of drastic changes happened to philosophy, science, society and politics, western thought and culture in general.
Enlightenment promoted new values and new ideas concerning economic, political and philosophical debates. Enlightenment thinkers put the absolute authority of the church and monarchy into doubt and laid the ground for a cultural revolution, which defended democracy and equality, focused on freedom, liberty, individualism, self-determination, human autonomy, human rights, simple justice, continuous progress, the necessity of popular government, and centrality of economics to politics (Bristow).
All these Enlightenment ideals have had a lasting impact on the world as we know it today.Margaret Thatcher is a great defender of the ideals of Enlightenment, even though she is considered to be a very controversial political figure in the history of Great Britain and on the international arena. Considering the fact that she started her career of a politician when Great Britain was deeply immersed in political, societal and economic instability, she might have not seceded in all her beginnings and democratic aims. But still she contributed a lot to the development of democracy and individualism in British society, and one of her most significant merits was that she put economy in center of the country’s politics. She declared her full commitment to the market economy, private enterprises, freedom of individuals, and national sovereignty (Scruton). Thatcher returned a lot of state-owned industries to the private sector, partially privatized education and health sector, cut red-tape and bureaucracy (Dorey).
However, in her opinion, individual freedom should be strictly under the law (Scruton), she increased employer’s power through reducing the rights of the workers, “encouraged huge salaries for “the bosses” as a reward for hard work, while condemning the “greed” of ordinary workers whenever they asked for a pay increase” (Dorey), contributed to the appearance of a new middle-class Party that focused primarily on punishing of the upper class, rather than on defending the rights of the middle class (Scruton). North Korea is a bright example of total violation of the ideals of Enlightenment in today’s world. There are no traces of democracy or individualism left in this country. As fairly noticed by Hitchens, the North Korean policy “is based on totalitarian ‘military first’ mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia” (Stateofenlightenment.com). In the center of the country’s politics is not economy, but military power. No human rights are preserved, no democratic laws can be found. There were some claims that to some extent incorporated the ideals of Enlightenment like “man has power to control his destiny”, but they did not have solid ground beneath and were …
