dbq essay

The Age of Democracy and the Age of Absolutism were two different periods of time. The age of Enlightenment had new ideas spreading throughout the world about government and human rights. The enlightenment was a great period of establishment of democracy .A democracy is when the common people are considered as the primary source of political power. Throughout the enlightenment there were philosophers who believed greatly in a democratic government. Some of the most familiar philosophers were Voltaire, John Locke, and Montesquieu. Each one of these philosophers was humanists and believed in natural rights. The Age of Absolutism was a time of absolute monarchs who had total control of everything. They made laws as they went along and if they didn’t like what the people said the monarchs would throw the people into jail and or put them to death. The Age of democracy is a response or answer to the Age of Absolutism by the new ideas that spread throughout the world. Although democracy and absolutism had advantages and disadvantages, democracy was a more effective type of government for it limited royal power and protected the rights of the people socially, politically, and economically. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tension arose between the two different types of governments, the democracy and absolute monarchs.

During the Age of Absolutism there were many different views on how to run a monarchy. There were so many different monarchs at the time; they all had different ways of running their perspective courts. In Machiavelli’s book, The Prince, he states that a prince must rule independently and not trust anyone but himself or herself. (Doc1)This statement is proven to be true with the example of King Louis XIV. He only trusted himself and nobody else, and by bringing the nobles to live with him at Versailles, it proved