Explain core Enlightenment ideas about natural rights, government by consent, and separation of powers, and identify their key thinkers.
The Scientific Revolution's success -- using reason and evidence to understand nature -- inspired a group of thinkers to ask whether reason could also improve government and society. This movement, called the Enlightenment, flourished through the 1600s and 1700s. English philosopher John Locke argued that all people hold natural rights -- to life, liberty, and property -- simply by being human, that legitimate government exists only by the consent of the governed, and that people have the right to resist a government that fails to protect those rights.
Other Enlightenment thinkers pushed the idea further. The French Baron de Montesquieu argued that government power should be divided into separate branches (making laws, enforcing laws, and judging laws) so that no single part of government could grow too powerful -- an idea you will recognize directly when you study the structure of the United States government. Voltaire championed freedom of speech and religion and criticized abuses by both the Church and absolute monarchs. Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued in The Social Contract that legitimate political authority comes from the collective will of the people, not from a king's birthright. None of these thinkers caused a revolution by themselves, but together their ideas built the intellectual case that ordinary people, not just kings, had the right to decide how they would be governed -- ideas you will trace directly into action next week.
Mastery looks like: They can state Locke's natural rights and consent-of-the-governed ideas, Montesquieu's separation of powers, and name at least one other Enlightenment thinker with an associated idea.
Common stumbles: Treating Enlightenment ideas as automatically causing revolutions by themselves, without recognizing that ideas need real political and social conditions to turn into action.