Since the dawn of mankind a struggle has existed resulting in a conflict between the self-interest of the individual and the interests of society in which he is a member. In the 18th and 19th century, Europe and America entered a period of radical change and the change tore down monarchies, separated colonies from imperialists, and changed the political landscapes of Europe and America. The change did not occur overnight however in the scope of human existence the change did occur in a relatively short period of time. The world was in conflict and those conflicts brought about change in Europe and America.
This era of change, commonly known as the Enlightenment or alternatively dubbed as the Age of Reason laid the cornerstone of the problems that European and American societies have faced ever since. Men like Thomas Jefferson crafted new governments founded on Enlightenment principles. These principles were often conveyed through the literature of the times and reflected the thinking of Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Adam Smith. They used words as a tool to fight the ancient world of authority and underline some of the conflicts between old and new to bring about change. Unfortunately, many of the builders of the new political states ignored the principle of self-interest of their citizens and this has led to many of the problems in today’s societies.
The old world followed the principles of Divine Right versus a government for the people and by the people. Monarchs ruled Europe through the centuries through this principle. The justification for Divine Right of Kings had its foundation in Theism. The modern approach of the Enlightened philosophers was Deism. The conflict of individual rights of man versus the rights by birth of the privileged class was a part of this. The ancients believed that only the monarchs could decide on the entitlement of an individual, and that entitlement comes by birth.
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In the late 18th century the increase in wealth from trading and then from the industrial revolution formulated a new class, the bourgeois. New conflicts arose, the class struggle between the workers and the bourgeois, pitting rich against poor. The bourgeois wanted political power to protect their self-interest and as a result the bourgeois were pitted against the old monarchies. By the middle of the 19th century the world quickly saw that the ideals of the Enlightenment philosophers with their slogan phrases that helped to bring about revolution across Europe and America were no more than words on paper. Once again the writers and philosophers of the time were called upon to bring about change.
Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto put the world in a new light “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones” (Tignor 613). The world had come full circle and ended up in the same place for the common man facing oppression by a new class of people, the bourgeois.
Frederick Douglass in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave points to the horrors of being a slave in America. The phrase all men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness did not apply to the black slave in America. Douglass said of his enslavers “I could regard them in no other light than a band of robbers,who had left their homes, and gone to Africa and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery” (Puchner 491). Why? To promote their self-interests of making more money by not paying for labor. Were slaves like free men entitled to an education?
When Mrs. Auld began teaching Douglass his alphabet, Mr. Auld forbade it exclaiming “it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read” (Puchner 488). Why was it against the law? Education could lead to revolt, and thus it was not in the self-interest of the slave owners. In a speech on July 4th 1852, Douglass poses the question “Must I undertake to prove that a slave is a man” (Tignor 573). In pure terms, where was the rational thought of the Enlightenment, what line of deductive reasoning could allow the Bill of Rights and slavery to exist in the same moment in the same country? The answer is so simple, the self-interest of the southern plantation owners.
By the early 20th century the women’s rights movement had major achievements “Feminism had won a major victory with the achievement of women’s suffrage in 1918 in Britain; the United States would give all women the vote in 1920” (Puchner 893). Virginia Woolf questions with sarcastic bewilderment “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved “ (Puchner 1086).
The ideals of the Enlightenment philosophers had stumbled and once again it was the writers like Douglass and Woolf who pointed to the issues. They wrote in the first person, a powerful form that was first used by Rousseau in Confessions.
The 20th century brought with it a very different world. Today we still face problems that began in the era of the Enlightenment. Politicians have become the new monarchs of modern times. Power has switched hands from the monarchs of feudal times to governments of compromise. In the 1960s, America steadfast in its principle had to face tumultuous times to bypass segregation in the southern states and creates a Civil Rights Act that went to reinforce the 13th Amendment that went to reinforce the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.
