Explain how Smith, Diderot, Condorcet, and Wollstonecraft helped to shape the concepts of social and economic progress during this period. What were their contributions?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Enlightenment thinkers developed theories on almost all matters of life, including social and economic forces.
The Scottish philosopher Adam Smith applied the idea of natural law to the domains of human labor, productivity, and the exchange of goods. His influential synthesis of ethics and economics, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, set forth the "laws" of labor, production, and trade. Smith contended that labor, a condition natural to humankind, was the foundation for prosperity and that a nation's wealth is not its land nor its money, but its labor force. He thus opposed all artificial restraints on economic progress and all forms of government regulation and control, leading to the modern concepts of the free market.
Denis Diderot summed up the reforming ideals of the Enlightenment with his monumental literary endeavor: the thirty-five-volume Encyclopédie. Encyclopédie was the largest compendium of contemporary social, philosophic, artistic, scientific, and technological knowledge ever produced in the West. In part a response to rising literacy and to the widespread public interest in the facts of everyday life, Diderot intended his Encyclopédie to dispel human ignorance and transform society.
Antoine Nicolas de Condorcet, a mathematician, a social theorist, and a political moderate, believed that human nature could be perfected through the application of reason. All errors in politics and morals, he argued, were based on philosophic and scientific errors. "There is not a religious system nor a supernatural extravagance," he wrote, "that is not founded on ignorance of the laws of nature." Fiercely optimistic about the future of humankind, Condorcet was one of the first male champions of sexual equality.
The rights of women was of particular interest to Mary Wollstonecraft, who applied Enlightenment principles of natural law, liberty, and equality to forge a radical rethinking of the roles and responsibilities of women in Western society. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft attacked the persistence of the female stereotype (docile, domestic, and childlike) as formulated by misguided, misogynistic, and tyrannical males, who, as she complained, "try to secure the good conduct of women by attempting to keep them in a state of childhood." She emphasized the importance of reason in the cultivation of virtue, criticizing women for embracing their roles in "the great art of pleasing [men]."