Importance of the Enlightenment

For the history of modern societies, the Enlightenment has undoubtedly been one of the most important and significant phenomena, not only for the changes that it generated at the time but because of the legacy that would become since then an indelible reality for a large part of societies westerners.

The Enlightenment can be defined in terms of one of the largest and most influential intellectual and cultural movements in the West, although it was undoubtedly much more than that. Emerged in light of the advances in science of past centuries and the reality of the eighteenth century, this motion It meant the preaching and dissemination of both political, scientific, cultural, economic and social ideas of a large number of innovative and revolutionary thinkers who they began to raise the need to end monarchical authoritarianism and the dictatorship of religion over reason, both elements that fully represented the Old Regime in Europe. These thinkers established in the middle of the 18th century the importance of societies developing their knowledge based on the use of reason and not of religious dogmas, as well as their massive diffusion and the modernization of both access and

Enlightenment thinkers have become extremely important when it comes to defining the notion of sovereignty popular and of a reality in which the same people become a main actor and capable of intervene in decisions of all kinds, no longer a mere obedient observer as he had been historically. Broadly speaking, this type of thought essentially proposed by Jean Jacques Rousseau and delimited in turn by other thinkers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Locke, etc. it has led to the current forms of government in the West known as indirect democracies; for many, the best known political form.

At the same time, the Enlightenment has a clear importance and significance with regard to the diffusion of the knowledge, which would be achieved with the publication of the majestic Encyclopedia, the most important scientific compendium of The time. In this way, it was possible to achieve that more and more of the population access to knowledge that was previously understood as a privilege and that was used by the dominant sectors to exercise power and dominance. All these elements ended up culminating in one of the most important events in history, the French Revolution that it was guided by the bourgeois intellectual sectors with the support of the peasantry and that it would mean the definitive path towards more open and democratic forms of political power.