Enlightenment Era Philosophes

[Pretty Flaco]

Are there any philosophes that weren't totally self righteous and elitist? I'm learning about them in my western civ class and the majority of them sound like total assholes and the ones that aren't only focus on economics and they're capitalists or mercantilists.

[Zanthorus]

Well, according to The Babouvists: From Utopian to Practical Socialism by K. D. Tonneson, which, inexplicably, has started to force you to by a subscription to 'Past and Present' to view it since I last read the paper, there were widespread ideas that among the French philosophes that Communism would be an ideal state of society, and no-one was ever attacked for putting forth the idea that property was a social convention and not a right, because Communism was regarded as so 'utopian' and impossible by most that advocacy was considered relatively harmless. However, Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of Equals actually took the statements about private property seriously and started drafting a practical plan for their implementation, which sort of upset things a little.

From what I recall, no philosophe is mentioned by name, apart from Rousseau, who did write a piece on the origins of inequality which states that the first man to build a fence or dig a ditch around a piece of land and say that it was his was the iniator of centuries of war and barbarism.