The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Were Witness to Several Intellectual Revolutions in Europe

Thinkers during this time were influenced by the likes of Newton, Bacon and Descartes of the Scientific Revolution. These scientific thinkers had managed to discover several laws of nature that seemed to regulate the way in which the universe functioned. Inspired by these developments, Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century attempted to make similar breakthroughs in the fields of society and government. Human nature, they claimed, was subject to laws and limits, just as nature was. If these laws could be discovered it would be theoretically possible to predict a person's actions and behavior. In fact, one late philosophe, Antoine-Nicholas Condorcet, felt that if history could be correctly interpreted it would be no great feat "to sketch, with some pretence to truth, the future destiny of man"(174).…