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Submitted by wswlacrosse on May 8, 2008
Category: American History
Words: 347 | Pages: 2
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The thinking of the Enlightenment era helped create the foundations of the Unites States democracy. Three of the thinkers in the Enlightenment era were Locke, Voltaire, and Rousseau.
John Locke’s beliefs were that any form of government that becomes destructive of these ends it’s the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. He was saying that if any part of the government gets to strong or is not doing what its suppose to do then the people have the right to over throw it and fix it. Thomas Jefferson applies this thought when he was writing the Declaration of Independence. The impacts on the government of the United States by this belief is that if the president starts abusing his powers the people have the right to kick him out of office and let someone knew come in.
Voltaire’s thoughts were a little different from Locke’s. He said that everyone should have religious freedom and freedom of speech. This is a huge impact on our government. If we didn’t have these two things our world would be so different. We would all have to practice the same religion. We would all have to watch what we say but because of him we don’t have to watch what we say. We can speak our mind without being punished.
Rousseau’s belief was natural state for humans, some control with some laws to limit people and this idea then led to democracy. If we didn’t have a democracy with laws we would have people running around and all the cities and towns would be going crazy because there would be no laws to govern them. With democracy people can still do what they want as long as they stay with inside the laws that we decided on to keep everyone safe.
If these three thinkers would not of came up with these idea’s the United States would be different. Who knows what it would be like if they did not think of these simple but very powerful thoughts.
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