The standards of rationality are treated in this book as certain regulators of social life. They are compared to the rudders of the great vessels constituted by social communities. The diversity exhibited by those standards do not only result from the differences of time and space of their implementation, but also from the differences in the sets of ideas put forward by the leading social thinkers accompanied by the different characteristics of their designated audiences. (Series: Development in Humanities - Vol. 7)

An examination of developments in seventeenth and eighteenth century thought, including writings by Comenius, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, James Watt, Herschel, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and others.