The Age of Reason
Many of the beliefs we hold today about freedom, government, and the inalienable rights of human beings were radical, fringe ideas in Mozart’s day. But it was precisely during that period—an era called the Enlightenment, coinciding with the late 17th through 18th century—that the roots of our modern belief systems were first developed and debated.
Beginning with philosophers such as René Descartes in France and Baruch Spinoza in the then Dutch Republic, thinkers began to reexamine old perspectives on the nature of the universe. Their yardsticks were logic, reason, and a kind of optimistic skepticism, rather than purely religious faith. In England, Francis Bacon introduced the method of scientific examination, a new way of finding the truth based on experiment and observation.
Before long, the tools of reason were being used to examine not only the natural world but the social world as well. Political thinkers like François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire, in France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Switzerland, and, in Great Britain, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and John Locke voiced the opinion that royalty and class systems were not part of the natural order. They proposed, contrarily, that all people come into the world with “natural” rights—especially a right to liberty. These rights might be masked or distorted, reinforced or weakened, defended or denied by the rules, structures, and class systems of society, but they could not be eliminated. Such views would lead to a war of independence in England’s American colonies and a revolution, deposing the royalty, in France. By the end of the 18th century, Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, would refer to this era as “the Age of Reason.”
Overall, the developments in thought and politics during the Enlightenment era effected large-scale changes in attitudes toward education, the exercise of the intellect, the rejection of superstition and violence, and the perfectibility of mankind—all ideas that find musical representation in The Magic Flute.