Essays Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words - 3

Essays - Essay Example e, the inventions in the scientific era yielded no fruits till later years in subsequent revolutions; however, some inventions owe more to the revolutions than the vice-versa. The invention of the steam engine owes more to science than what science the steam engine. The correlation and dependency of the revolutions explain that the French revolution could be termed as the greatest in world history. Today, democracy can be regarded as the most appreciated system of governance. Democracy traces its foundation to the French revolution. Monarchism, aristocracy, and religious privileges were overthrown and in their place came democracy, liberalism, secularism and declaration of human rights and freedom. Enlightened absolutism can be defined as a form of absolute monarchism surviving on the foundation of enlightenment ideas. The Russian empress, Catherine the Great, governed on the ideals of enlightenment philosophers by the names of Beccaria, Montesquieu, and de Gouges. She depicted the characters of a monarch by imprisoning many of her opponents, declined the principle of a social contract and facilitated religious tolerance by advocacy of the Russian Orthodox Church to tolerate outsiders (Foran 23). Enlightenment could be termed as the world major intellectual revolution. It spread across boundaries but never affected all. People affected were primarily under monarchies, and thus those aristocrats were free from the effects of enlightenment. The aftereffects of enlightenment were both negative and positive. The positive ones included, advances in literacy levels among the citizenry and promoted open mindedness in regard to intellectual matters. The people, however, fell into the trap of intellectual frauds. For instance, physiognomists claimed to be able to forecast psychological characteristics, people got themselves gullible to such quack fields of knowledge primarily based on superstition. Other major, effects of enlightenment include, the invention of that the