This artifact is a pair of essays, one examining the relationship between the Enlightened Despots and other figures of the Enlightenment, and the other looks at some of the failures of Enlightenment ideas both at the time of their first being posited and in the modern day. This artifact meets the criteria for Social Scientific Literacy by looking at human ideologies and how some of them have interacted over the past few centuries. More specifically, in the first essay I examined how some monarchs contemporary with the Enlightenment attempted to synthesize traditional monarchism with the liberal ideals of some Enlightenment thinkers, with mixed responses from such persons as Voltaire and Thomas Hobbes.

The second essay looked at why the general worldview of the Enlightenment (insofar as one can say there was one Enlightenment worldview, which is not a very helpful nor very accurate statement to make) was resisted, both in that time and in the modern day. Some attention is given there to the phenomenon of people coming full circle from the Enlightenment back into classical Christianity or even into Paganism (though, it must be said, usually a form of Paganism heavily influenced by Christian and/or Enlightened ideas). This is due, I argue there, to the innate need in humans to recognize and interact with the preternatural.

One goal I had writing this was to examine the ideological motivations behind how different people responded to the Enlightenment. While this goal was mostly met by including the Enlightened Despots and Philosophes in the first essay, and some anti-Enlightenment thinkers in the second, there is room for improvement. One thing I could have done better with the first essay is include the perspective of an Enlightenment figure who was not sympathetic to Absolutism, such as John Locke. But, all in all, I am pleased with my work here, and I find no reason to doubt its sufficiency for the criteria at hand.