The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment refers to a shift in European thought during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which reason, rather than religious authority or inherited tradition, came to be seen as the proper basis for understanding the world. Enlightenment thinkers placed the human being at the centre of this new picture: a person capable of rational, critical thought was seen as both the source and the user of all valid knowledge. This had two consequences that matter for the origins of sociology. First, since society is something built by human beings and not handed down by nature or the divine, it followed that society could be studied rationally, the same way any other human creation could be studied and understood. Second, the Enlightenment pushed nature, religion and divine will out of the centre of explanation and replaced them with secular, scientific and humanistic ways of thinking. It is worth noting, too, that this same emphasis on reason was used, in a troubling way, to rank human beings -- those judged capable of rational thought were considered fully human, while those who were not (as colonial Europe saw the inhabitants of societies it was conquering) were viewed as less evolved. This reveals that the Enlightenment's legacy was not simply liberating; it also shaped some of the prejudiced assumptions that early social thought …