Influence Of The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is often thought to have had the most influence in European nations like England, Scotland, or Holland, but in reality it had just as much of an impact if not more in the United States. The American Revolution acted in a manner to allow enlightened thoughts to be imported into America. The Enlightenment represented a pursuit for a deeper understanding, often coined “The Age of Reason”, people looked for a more justified methods rather than the traditional ones. One of the major themes tended to be a movement away for evangelical reasoning, particularly in law. A push for a separation of church and state coincided with a shift from canon law to civil law, or church law to secular law. America’s Constitution and the Founding

“American administrative law is strongly influenced by the Enlightenment logic of Reductionism of atomizing wholes into smaller and smaller parts. The fragmentation of decision-making authority is an Enlightenment feature of the U.S. Constitution, and the federalist structure fosters further divisions of power.” The structure of the U.S. government is unique, each body servers a specific purpose and inside each body it is further broken down into smaller parts. For example, the US Senate’s purpose is to draft legislation, but inside the Senate it is divided into numerous committees and subcommittees that specify in a particular area, like energy or the environment. This process is committed in a systematic manner nearly scientific, which is another correlation to the Enlightenment. Another aspect of administrative law that is based in the Enlightenment is they American system of checks and balances. The idea that each branch of government acts as a check on the other so that no one branch can become too powerful. “Montesquieu believed that “mixed government” was a safeguard against despotism. As practiced by Enlightenment thinkers, the mixed government safeguard rested on the Newtonian paradigm of “clockwork precision” and oppositional