The Enlightenment philosophes were the social critics, the most vigorous Europe had known for centuries. Voltaire and his colleagues attacked the churches of their day – Catholic and Protestant – as nests of superstition, fanaticism, and useless logic-chopping. They condemned the European aristocracy as mere decorations rather than pillars of society, daring to suggest that merit might be more important in determining a person’s true value than inherited social position. And if kings and queens were less vigorously assaulted, it was primarily because the philosophes hoped to work through duly enlightened absolutists to build a more rational and more just world.

On the positive side, these same often satirical social critics found hope in the Scientific Revolution that a better society was possible once human reason was set to solving social problems. Another century or two of determined social-scientfic inquiry, they believed, would uncover “natural laws” as valid in society as the laws of planetary motion or law of gravity were in the material world.

It was a period of revolutionary social thought that seemed to shed a dazzling new light on the way human society works. The subversive attacks of the philosophies fueled the fires on the impending American and French revolutions. Their social theories would provide support for the social engineering and big government, as well as the more revolutionary creeds, of our own time.

1. La Ilustración

2. El Siglo de las Luces y El Razonamiento

Vamos a estudiar una de las etapas más interesantes de fines de la Edad Moderna: La Ilustración nos demostrará los incesantes cambios económicos, sociales, culturales y políticos que ha sufrido Europa, sobre todo Francia, desde el siglo XVII hasta el siglo XVII-XIX inclusive, gestando las bases de lo que sería la revolución más relevante de la historia de Francia en 1789 gracias a los aportes de grandes intelectuales como Voltaire, Rousseau y los enciclopedistas.