In what specific ways did the ideas of the enlightenment challenge long-held assumptions about government and social order?

Answer: The idea that the enlightenment portrayed opened many minds up to the fact that the church and the government should be separate (since they are different entities) and that both should be limited in the lives of citizens.

Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher and scientist, was one of the key figures in the political debates of the Enlightenment period. He introduced a social contract theory based on the relation between the absolute sovereign and the civil society.

Hobbes argued that in order to avoid chaos, which he associated with the state of nature, people accede to a social contract and establish a civil society.