cal discourse by the early eighteenth century and identified with the "age of reason," was a project of Western liberal thought that represented an attempt to improve human life on earth, seeing humanity in terms of its potential and demonstrating to man by the use of systematic reasoned argument how he should live. On the belief that life could be improved through education, order, and discipline and that feudal aristocracy and religious authority had hampered human improvement, Enlightenment philosophy fostered a concept of progress of the human race. If it was the case that mankind could achieve happiness and enlightenment on earth and if civil society hampered such achievement, then it was also the case that as a matter of human reason and logic, and in later Enlightenment thought as a matter of satisfactory human emotion, civil society could be transformed. Thus even if Enlightenment thought was not revolutionary, it was significant because it indirectly produced revolution. Indeed the American and French Revolutions can be seen as logical outgrowths of the Enlightenment.
Voltaire (1694-1778), first among equals of the French philosophes, was a principal exponent of the Enlightenment's "smile of reason," who outspokenly opposed intolerance, ignorance, and public and private superstition and who was a sharp, witty critic of French culture and society in the years leading up to the French Revolution. Though a product of the middle class, he led a precarious political life in France and spent much time in exile in England and Switzerland. Typical of his humanism was his famous work Candide, written after a disastrous earthquake in Lisbon that he felt was not God's will and that should instead be the basis for concrete humanitarian aid to the unfortunate.
Revolution is a term referring to the displacement of established government by a new government structure, and it came into its own as political praxis in the last quarter of t...