The Enlightenment was a cultural and intellectual movement, primarily European, that was born in the mid-eighteenth century and lasted until the early years of the nineteenth century. He was especially active in France, England and Germany. It inspired profound cultural and social changes, and one of the most dramatic was the French Revolution. It was named in this way for its stated purpose of dispelling the darkness of the ignorance of humanity through the lights of knowledge and reason.
The thinkers of the Enlightenment argued that human knowledge could combat ignorance, superstition and tyranny to build a better world. The Enlightenment had a great influence on scientific, economic, political and social aspects of the time. This type of thinking was expanded in the bourgeoisie and in a part of the aristocracy, through new means of publication and dissemination, as well as meetings, held at the home of wealthy people or aristocrats, in which intellectuals and politicians participated in order to expose and debate about science, philosophy, politics or literature.
The Enlightenment can be defined as "a historical stage of the global evolution of bourgeois thought". As such, he would insert his doctrinal affiliation in the Renaissance and, especially, in the rationalist and empiricist currents of the s. XVII (from Descartes, to Locke, going through Bacon, Bayle, Galileo, Grotius, Hobbes, Leibniz, Newton, Spinoza, or the libertines), and bases his sociological possibility of development on the Dutch and English political revolutions, on the push of the bourgeoisie and economic changes in gestation, supported by a rising economic situation, which will lead to the French Revolution.
