ABSTRACT
One might wish to regard the Enlightenment less as an event, period, or movement, than as the mentality given clearest form in the synthetic philosophies of history of the eighteenth century. Undoubtedly the pinnacle of this type of philosophical history is Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind of 1794 (1955), but its principleswith certain reservations and modifications-are also found in the great systematic and stage-developmental theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as those of Adam Smith and Comte. The Enlightenment philosophy of history of the eighteenth century was not simply a form of the ‘progress thinking’ that had been in existence since the Renaissance, but a version of history in which the present is determined by the movement of linear time towards an open, and indefinitely perfectible, future. Thus, although history has no final state so that it is not ideologically limited in advance, this philosophy of history is a teleology that infers a direction and purpose in each moment of the historical sequence (Falk 1988:377-82).2
