AP® World History: Modern · Unit 5 · Topic 5.1
The Enlightenment's New Idea About Power
Enlightenment thinkers argued that governments get their authority from the consent of the people they rule, not from God handing power down to a king. That flip justified limiting rulers, dividing power, and even overthrowing bad governments.
For most of history, power made sense as a vertical chain: God chose the king, the king ruled the people, and questioning him meant questioning God. That is divine-right monarchy, and it made obedience automatic, not something a ruler had to earn. Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau turned that chain upside down. They argued people are born with natural rights, and governments exist only because people agree to set them up to protect those rights. Authority now flows upward: from individual people, who consent to be governed, to the government they create. If a government stops protecting its people, Locke argued, the people can replace it. That is the social contract: not a literal document anyone signed, but a way of explaining why government has any right to rule at all.
Montesquieu took the next step: if power corrupts, do not let any one person or body hold all of it. He proposed splitting government into legislative, executive, and judicial branches, each able to check the others, so ambition could counter ambition and no single branch could seize total control. This is separation of powers, and it assumes government is a human invention that needs built-in restraints, not a sacred office above question.
These ideas sat quietly in books and salons until they met real grievances. Unit 5's revolutions, American, French, Haitian, and Latin American, took consent and checked power from theory to practice, overthrowing or reshaping monarchies that claimed divine backing.
Key terms
- Divine right
- The claim that a monarch's authority comes directly from God, making obedience a religious duty.
- Social contract
- The idea that people agree, implicitly, to form government in exchange for protection of their natural rights.
- Consent of the governed
- The principle that political authority is legitimate only when the people being ruled agree to it.
- Separation of powers
- Dividing government into branches, such as legislative, executive, and judicial, so each can check the others.
- Natural rights
- Rights, such as life, liberty, and property, that Enlightenment thinkers believed all people hold simply by being human.
Watch it explained
- How it worksShow me power flowing down from God to a king, then flip it and show it flowing up from the people.
- How it worksWalk me through how separating a government into three branches is supposed to stop a tyrant.
- Common mistakeWhy isn't the social contract an actual contract anyone ever signed?
- Going furtherWhat happens to a monarchy when its own king starts calling himself a servant of the state?
Check yourself
End of topic.