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He was the first American philosopher that proposed the emancipation of African slaves and the abolition of slavery in the New World, idea shown in his article “African American in America”. In some other works, especially in Agrarian Justice, he argues land ownership separates many people from their rightful means of survival, a revolutionary concept if we look to the ideas of philosophers of the time such as Locke or Grotius.
For him, the government is a necessary evil that should be controlled by frequent free elections in order to avoid infringements and corruption. Actually, Paine argues monarchy and, especially, absolute monarchies, are against the divine law written in the Bible and, so, they are against the law they say has given them legitimation. Challenging the twin power of the Church and the state through his writings, he influenced the French and the American Revolutions.
As well as most of his enlightened contemporaries did, Voltaire didn’t consider anything that couldn't be supported by reasoned and reasonable evidence. In the governments of the era when Voltaire lived, political power passed through families and ruling individuals could act as they pleased. Nevertheless, he considered these governments self-destructive for the state and believed they should just care about protecting the liberties of the people. He also defended religion was a tool used by the pope and his subjects to protect and increase their power as well as an instrument to eliminate those with different beliefs. Moreover, Voltaire argued the wealth of the rich was detrimental to the misery of the poor, and that was the reason why he despised the traditional economic system of his era. Those ideas were actually revolutionary for a time where absolutism and religion were dominant, and his work influenced important events in the world like the French Revolution* as well as philosophers like Karl Marx and his work on socialism/early communism.
*The French revolutionaries considered Voltaire so important for their cause that they ordered to bury him in the Pantheon of Paris
In his writings, Rousseau argues that the development of science and art has caused the corruption of human morality. Actually, one of the central claims of his work is that human beings are basically good by nature, but became corrupted by the historical events that had happened until his days. "The Emile" and "The Social Contract", both published in 1762, were his major works and opposed the idea that monarchs were divinely empowered to legislate; the government was only a representative of the sovereign, the people, charged with executing the general will ("Let us then admit that force does not create right and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers"). However, this caused a great controversy in France and the books were immediately banned, so he was forced to go into exile to Switzerland, but continued having problems with authority and died trying to justify his work and ideas.
Rousseau’s writing influenced Immanuel Kant and his political ideals were the flag of the leaders of the French Revolution.
Montesquieu proposed the separation of powers in the legislative, executive and judiciary branches which check each other’s power. In one of his books, "The Spirit of Laws", he states that “In every government, there are three sorts of power the legislative in respect to things dependent on the law of nations, the executive in regard to matters that depend on the civil law and the judiciary to apply regulations. By virtue of the first, the prince or magistrate enacts temporary or perpetual laws. By the second, he makes peace or war, sends or receives embassies, establishes the public securities. By the third, he punishes criminals and determines the disputes that arise between individuals. The latter we shall call judiciary power.”
According to Montesquieu, there only existed three types of government: monarchies, republics and dictatorships. Montesquieu believed that the democratic republics where all leaders are elected by the society, are the best form of government to avoid the tyranny of the monarchies and, especially, the dictatorships. He also thought that law is and should be, the result of the experience and the mores of society. Consequently, in his opinion, the law should be something that could be modified and improved through time.
Locke's work was focused on political philosophy, especially the nature of the relationship between the government and the people. Locke revised the social contract, an Enlightenment theory that says individuals create a government by agreeing to give up some freedoms in exchange for the protection of other freedoms.
Moreover, Locke argued that people are born equal and independent, but they form a society in order to create impartial governments that could solve conflicts. He thought the relationship between people and government was a kind of exchange: the government was supposed to protect the rights of the people while people legitimate it to do that labour. These are the main ideas of his book, "Two Treatises on Government".
Hobbes’s biggest contribution to the political thinking was his reflexion on how human beings can live together in peace, avoiding danger and civil conflicts. To solve this problem, he proposes we should give our obedience to a sovereign entity (a person or group with the power to decide every social and political issue).Thomas Hobbes thinks that, otherwise, what awaits us is a "state of nature" similar to civil war. This situation of insecurity, where fear and violence guide human acts, is considered in his book “Leviathan” as the “Bellum omnium contra omnes” (war of everyone against everyone).
Hobbes argued that the agreement of the social contract to give up some of the natural rights was something implicit when we are born within a civil society with laws and contracts in place. In his opinion, the social contract inverts the state of nature thanks to a more intelligent way to preserve oneself avoiding conflict, that is the natural state of the human being.
Grotius made natural law the handbook of lawyers and philosophers by asserting that, because of the nature of human beings, natural laws were strongly united to the men and were supreme and trustworthy. Moreover, he proposed that the ethic of natural law should be applied to all rational beings; Christians, Muslims, Hindus, atheists… alike. Apart from this, he also suggested the concept of “Just War” as those wars which were required by natural, national and divine judgment, always within certain circumstances. Actually, his major work, "De Jure Belli ac Pacis" (The Rights of War and Peace in English), is an example of this concepts, as well as "Mare Liberum", where he expressed his ideas in favour of the freedom of the seas, the antecedent of the modern law of the seas.
Furthermore, he was influenced by classical philosophers and modern humanists, whose ideas led him to propose the re-unification of Catholic Church through civil religion and toleration.
Bodin’s work is largely based on his well-known book, "Six Books of the Republic", where he formulated national sovereignty and the coexistence of different religions within the commonwealth.
His homeland country, France, was suffering a religious war and he was convinced that peace could be achieved just if the sovereign prince was given absolute and indivisible power of the state. For Bodin, absolutism was the unique way of maintaining political and social stability. Furthermore, he aimed to reform the judicial system of France and formulated one of the earliest versions of the quantitative theory of money, known in a part of his opposition to slavery, which was just booming.
He believed the prosperity of the state is the responsibility of the ruler and should be achieved by any means possible, as he shows with this sentence from "The Prince": "In the actions of all men, especially princes, where there is no recourse to justice, the end is all that counts; a prince should only be concerned with conquering or maintaining a state.” Looking through his work, Machiavelli tried to show that perfection doesn’t exist and it can’t be a perfect leader, good and generous. As he said: “Since love and fear can hardly exist together if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than to be loved”. In his less popular work, "Discourses", he strongly showed a preference for republicanism and restated the idea that an authoritarian leader brings stability, while a democratic leader leads to instability for the state.
He wrote the "Declaration of Independence" and became the third president of the United States of America in 1801. During his period as a politician representing his homeland Virginia, Jefferson showed a clear liberal and anti-slavery ideology, although he was a slave owner and believed that black people were inferior to white people. He proposed a public education system for all Americans, freedom of vote, freedom of speech and a series of economic and political issues that had the objective of moving away the aristocracy from the government. Jefferson felt that urbanization, industrial factories and speculation would just serve to steal the independence and economic freedom of most of the society, but he argued the expansion of the United States into the west would provide the space and land needed to support an agrarian democracy (America’s aim was to made of agriculture the basis of its economy).
Furthermore, this Virginian believed in a wise and frugal Government “which shall restrain men from injuring one another" that, on the other side, should allow them to solve their own issues. Actually, he thought the unique way to reach these objectives was a republican system in which power was shared by the states and a federal government with limited powers.
Franklin was crucial in pushing America towards independence and in the establishment of America as a democracy. He signed both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and supported the unification of the American colonies as one nation. Furthermore, his thoughts on religion and politics were revolutionary, and still are today, as he completely rejected the authority of Colonial Empires such as England and the Church (“Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God”). Actually, he showed through his writings that science, reason and secularism should be the maxims of a prosperous country.
He exposed the idea that people should choose the government representatives they feel will contribute to their development and the development of the country, what was the contrary of the English “non-written” law that imposed taxes to the colonies but left their inhabitants without political representation. In this way, he established two types of humans in the society: the aristocrats and the entrepreneurs. Referring to the first group, he said they were unproductive and did not contribute to the development of the nation, whilst the second group represented the most useful humans of a society: people who worked towards enhancing the society they lived in.
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she appealed to egalitarian social ideology as the founding basis for the creation and development of equal rights and opportunities for women. As her writings showed, the origins of morality in all human beings, male or female, is the possession of the faculty of reason; Wollstonecraft argued women must claim their equality by accepting her unemotional rules. Moreover, the English woman proposed that excessive concern about love and physical desirability are not the natural conditions of female but rather the long-lasting imposed means by which male domination has enslaved them throughout time. By showing that the life conditions of women differ little from imprisonment, he tries to make all women react against their oppressors just as if they were a colony rebelling against their founding country; he promotes with his writings the idea of women emancipation of man rule.
Herder was a german political philosopher whose ideas influenced European thoughts on nationalism and patriotic feelings during the 18th century. He also offers his condemnation of the expansionist nationalism and does not propose the “German ethnic superiority”. In his works, he shows a conception of national identity that is more referred to ethics than the racial or ethnic people linked by a common language and common traditions; they are part of a “national character" that receives the name of Volksgeist (nation’s spirit in german), different in every nation.
The work of Immanuel Kant is largely recognised as one of the most influential in Europe since the 18th century for the important events it influenced and influences today yet through three main ideas: the categorical imperative, the transcendental idealism and the belief in God’s creation of the soul.
First of all, the categorical imperative is an ethical principle based on the respect of the humanity of the rest: “act only in accordance with that maxim rule through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law”. In addition, Kant formulated a new term, “the transcendental idealism”, by which he tried to distinguish between that we can experience (the real world) and that we cannot (“supersensible” beings like God), arguing we can only have knowledge of the things we can experience. However, although he was an actually advanced man in his era, he continued arguing, as most of his contemporaries did, that we should believe in the existence of God and an immortal soul ruled by the principles of justice.
In the second place, Kant supported the social contract as the foundational basis of states and the separation of power, and also as the key to the freedom of the individual. In this way, he argued that when the freedoms of all are not controlled, the strong people would dominate the weak and would restring their freedoms. For this reason, representatives are elected to legislate laws taking into account the “general will”, rather than the interests of an individual or a lobby.
Finally, he proposed that the perfect society would be the one with total freedom to pursue happiness in any way (as long as this search respected other’s rights), freedom of religion and freedom of speech. Moreover, Kant tells us that, as well as people cannot be used as a tradeable object (opposing the slavery of the Atlantic triangular trade), states cannot be traded as though they were a property.
His major essay, "Theory and Practice", was a well-reasoned writing in which he defended that the all-known idea that theory is different in many cases to the practice, in other words, that ideas are different to reality, was wrong. As he said, philosophical work provides the theory, the thesis, but it is up to our judgement to apply that theory.
Hegel's main philosophical idea was “speculative reason”, a concept by which the contradictions and tensions of philosophy, culture and society, could be interpreted as a rational unity ("the absolute idea" or "absolute knowledge"). Actually, he believed that everything had a relation and that the separation of reality into different parts was wrong, opposing the ideas philosophers had had since the ancient times. Moreover, Hegel saw history as a progression in which every event occurs to solve a contradiction of the previous movements, what should end up in a rational society or state. However, Hegel's vision of the state as a rational body, like some other philosophers such as Johann Guttfried von Herder thought (Volkgeist), leaves no room for individual choice, nor for the freedom he was claiming.
Another important point in Hegel’s work was the dialectical thinking, a concept shown in one of his most important works, "The Phenomenology of Mind", which was the first part of his comprehensive scientific system (thesis-antithesis-synthesis). E.g:
“A thesis like tyranny is opposed to liberty, that is the antithesis, and both are summarised in the synthesis: a law”
Hegel claimed that his own system of philosophy was a historical culmination of all previous philosophical thought done by some of the figures cited in this work.
