Bastille Day
And here’s another, rather sanguinary, quote for Bastille Day from the great Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot (1713-1784):"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
Whatever your views on the French Revolution—and mine are mixed—I suggest that readers open a bottle of good French wine and drink to the memory of that great classical liberal Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), who perished during the French Revolution.
As the notable British political philosopher
H. B.Acton (1908-1974) wrote: “Wholly a man of the Enlightenment, an advocate of economic freedom, religious toleration, legal and educational reform, and the abolition of slavery, Condorcet sought to extend the empire of reason to social affairs. Rather than elucidate human behaviour, as had been done thus far, by recourse to either the moral or physical sciences, he sought to explain it by a merger of the two sciences that eventually became transmuted into the discipline of sociology.”