What the exam asks
- Multiple-choice sets frequently use excerpts from declarations, feminist pamphlets, or abolitionist petitions, asking you to connect the text’s argument to Enlightenment principles like empiricism, natural rights, or the social contract.
- Short-answer questions (SAQs) often test Skill 1 (Developments and Processes) and Reasoning Process: Causation by asking how 18th-century intellectual shifts caused 19th-century social reforms (such as the abolition of slavery or serfdom).
- DBQs and LEQs test Themes CDI (Cultural Developments and Interactions) and SIO (Social Interactions and Organization), requiring you to evaluate the extent to which Enlightenment ideals transformed society versus whom they initially excluded.
Core ideas
Reason, empiricism, and religion (CDI)
Building on the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment thinkers applied empiricism—the principle (championed by Francis Bacon and John Locke) that knowledge comes from sensory observation and experience rather than inherited religious dogma—to human relationships. Thinkers emphasized reason to solve social problems and reexamined religion’s public role. Many embraced Deism (viewing God as a rational creator who does not intervene in daily human affairs) and argued for religious toleration and the separation of church and state.
Individualism, natural rights, and nationalism (CDI, GOV)
Enlightenment philosophy centered on the individual rather than hereditary estates or divine-right monarchs:
- Natural rights: John Locke argued that individuals possess innate rights to life, liberty, and property that predated governments.
- Social contract: Thinkers like Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that governments derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed. If a ruler violates the contract, subjects have the right to rebel.
- Nationalism: As divine right lost legitimacy, loyalty shifted from a monarch to the “nation”—a community bound by shared language, culture, or history. Nationalism became a major force both uniting fragmented peoples (like in Germany and Italy) and threatening multiethnic empires (like the Ottoman and Austrian empires).