Ateísmo e comunismo: o lugar de Jean Meslier na filosofia política das Luzes

Abstract

When we talk about the French Enlightenment, specially the political thought of that period, our manuals and academic philosophy courses privilege only thinkers of the stock of Montesquieu and Rousseau, disdaining others based on weak arguments. That's the case, for instance, of Jean Meslier (1664-1729), a village vicar which wrote, around 1720, a radical work, in which he preconizes the union of the oppressed aiming the strangling of the last king with the bowels of the last priest. While the more known figures of Enlightenment, most of them hailing from the noble and the bourgeois classes, advocate deism, private property and enlightened despotism as elements of a true civilization, Meslier, long before them, sustained deicide, tyrannicide and communism as the bases of a new world, a singularity which warrants to him, the way we see it, a place of great importance in the political philosophy of Enlightenment.