Concept in Definition ABC

The term Enlightenment is commonly used to designate that movement from thought which covered much of the West from the 18th century onwards. Its peak would be the French Revolution, perhaps one of the most important revolutions of the human being, since in it the values ​​and thought patterns of the Enlightenment were advocated.

The Enlightenment can be characterized as a complex movement of thought and culture that had as the main objective the expansion of reason over the passions of religion or tradition. In this sense, the axes of the Enlightenment began to spread from the philosophical and scientists with great authors such as Descartes, Locke, Bacon, Newton and Galileo among many others. These thinkers and scientists had already been developing works in which the use of reason and empiricism prevailed over dogmas and religious beliefs.

All this tradition of rational thought would have a special reception in places like France and Great Britain, where the increasingly growing bourgeois sectors demanded more.

participationpolitics and social recognition. This situation allowed the increase of thinkers who advocated values ​​such as rationality, the recognition of personal capacities over inheritance of the nobility, human freedom over the influence of traditional institutions, private property over the power of the State, among others.

The enlightened thinkers therefore opposed everything that represented the Old Regime, the monarchy and the royal lifestyle, exaggerated in its luxuries and privileges. Thanks to the advance of capitalism and his notion that the triumph of each individual does not depend more than on his own capacities, as well as on the advance of currents of thought based on reason and on the observation direct from reality, the Enlightenment would become a phenomenon of great importance each time, succeeding in 1789 making its paradigms heard in the revolutionary event par excellence: the Revolution French.

Among the most prominent characters of this complex current of thought we must count Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Locke, Bentham, Smith, Benjamin Franklin, Kant and many more.

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