Enlightenment and Revolution

The Enlightenment was all about the secular discoveries of human capacity; what people could learn, achieve, how they functioned in society, Enlightenment ideas that did work as well as ones that did not work. The Enlightenment thoughts of individualism, efficiency, and capitalism began to reinforce and make their mark on the industrial revolution when the notion of reason was applied.

During the Enlightenment many of the great thinkers began to see human beings as flawed, unpredictable, and perhaps a bit inefficient because they could get sick ( as they had all witnessed first hand during the black death). However, during the Industrial Revolution, the thought was that the hindrance of human frailty could all be avoided with machinery because human power was flawed and unpredictable, machines were more efficient. And so, the great Industrial Revolution to make machines that could manufacture and produce better than their human counterparts began. 





The themes of ‘discovery’ that were present during the Enlightenment certainly spilled over into the Industrial Revolution. Germs in particular, and the germ-theory of disease is a direct result of the reinforcement ideas of discovery and questioning during the Enlightenment.  The previous theory that miasma (bad air) spread illness was rethought when physicians such as John Snow and Louis Pasteur discovered how certain germs were actually spread. The most revolutionary discovery was by Robert Koch, who discovered a link between microorganisms and disease through a series of questions to ask of infected individuals. Which in turn led to the basis of public health and sanitation campaigns. The questioning minds of the Enlightenment that circled around humans and their relationship with the world around them reinforced the Industrial Revolutions methods of scientific questioning and ‘reasoning’.