How did the Enlightenment affect the lives of ordinary people?

Perhaps the most obvious way the Enlightenment affected the lives of ordinary people is the role it played in fostering revolutions in the eighteenth century. While the causal link between the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions is not a clear one, certainly these revolutions, which changed the lives of millions of ordinary people, were strongly influenced and justified by Enlightenment thought. The Enlightenment affected ordinary people in other ways. Enlightenment thinkers proposed legal...

Perhaps the most obvious way the Enlightenment affected the lives of ordinary people is the role it played in fostering revolutions in the eighteenth century. While the causal link between the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions is not a clear one, certainly these revolutions, which changed the lives of millions of ordinary people, were strongly influenced and justified by Enlightenment thought. The Enlightenment affected ordinary people in other ways. Enlightenment thinkers proposed legal reforms in a number of areas, including penal codes, marriage and inheritance laws, and laws regarding religious establishment. Many of these reforms were actually implemented in a number of places, including the United States, Great Britain, and France, and they affected ordinary people as much as anyone else. The "print revolution" that led to increased literacy throughout Europe in the eighteenth-century is also generally associated with the Enlightenment's push for greater literacy, even if most Europeans were not reading Enlightenment texts. At the same time, some changes that emerged among the people--the religious revivals of the Great Awakening, for example--were in many ways a reaction among ordinary people to the rationalism of the Enlightenment.