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Essay On Enlightenment

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The Enlightenment was a period of time when several ideas were spreading around Europe. And many of them made change to people’s way of thinking, some important ideas were: Natural Rights, the belief that people have the right to life, liberty, and to own property. The next one is the Social Contract, the Social Contract was an unwritten agreement to follow the law of the country and in turn, get protection from the country. With the introduction of the idea of Equal Rights, Enlightenment ideas were really starting to make sense. Some documents, such as the US Bill of Rights, The Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Haitian Constitution will prove the importance of Natural Rights. The US Bill of Rights had mentioned the rights of the …show more content…

There was a document that told the reader of the fundamental rights that the citizen had that was called The Declaration of the Rights of Man, and that is one of the holders of the meaning of natural rights. Article 2 says that, “[the] aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and [unalienable] rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression”, which means that the rights given to man, that can’t be taken away, are the rights to liberty, the right to own property, national protection, and resistance to tyranny. Sometime during 1801, the Haitian Constitution was made, and this document took an extraordinary amount of Enlightenment ideals into consideration, as it says in Art V, “no other distinctions exist than those of virtues and talents, nor any other superiority than that granted by the law in the exercise of a public charge. The law is the same for all, whether it punishes or protects”, and that’s what it is. So, law is equal for everyone. So, with the evidence from three great documents/sources, I can conclude that the idea of Natural Rights is the most important. To clarify, the US Bill of Rights, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the Haitian Constitution of 1801, three essential building blocks of several important governments, emphasize the importance of natural rights. And that’s why the Enlightenment is still important, especially

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