ABSTRACT
The importance of the Enlightenment, both as social movement and period of intense intellectual development, cannot easily be over-stressed, particularly as it effects discussion of sociology and the sociology of knowledge. What the philosophes produced, when their gaze was directed towards scientific analysis of society, was characteristically a sociology of ideas and values. In modern terms they were more interested in the cultural components, than in the structure, of the social system, and such an interest arose out of their efforts to break down moral and political philosophy into secular, non-metaphysical and primarily rational elements. The Enlightenment, spreading reason like light, produced social sciences by unifying science with rationality in the best Newtonian tradition. Montesquieu's sociology of knowledge really amounts to a theory of how the social structure of a society reflects, and in its turn is reflected by, the social values of its inhabitants.
