(a) The philosophers and thinkers may have laid the foundation of the French Revolution, but it was precipitated by social and…

(a) Philosophers as foundation, social and economic causes as precipitants of the French Revolution

The statement distinguishes the intellectual foundation from the immediate causes, and the distinction is sound. Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws (1748) argued for the separation of powers, Voltaire attacked clerical intolerance and arbitrary power, Rousseau's Social Contract (1762) made the general will the source of legitimacy, and the Encyclopédie of Diderot (1751–72) spread rationalist critique through salons, cafés and pamphlets. Together they gave the Third Estate the vocabulary of liberty, equality and popular sovereignty and delegitimised privilege and absolutism.

But ideas became a force only when social and economic conditions made change urgent. Society was divided into three estates, and the clergy and nobility, about two per cent of the population, were largely exempt from the taille and other taxes, while holding feudal dues over peasants. The bourgeoisie, rich and educated, were shut out from office and rank. The monarchy had fiscal crisis: debts from wars, above all the American War, meant that interest took about half of state expenditure by 1788, and Calonne, Necker and Brienne failed to reform taxation because the privileged resisted in the Assembly of Notables (1787) and the parlements.

The crisis became explosive through poor harvests in 1788 and the severe winter that followed, when bread prices rose sharply and urban poor and peasants turned to riot. The Estates General met in May 1789, the Third Estate declared itself a National Assembly and took the Tennis Court Oath in June, the Bastille fell on 14 July, and the abolition of feudal privileges followed on 4 August.

Historians differ. Lefebvre and Soboul stressed class conflict and the bourgeois character of the revolution, while revisionists such as Cobban, and Furet in another way, emphasised politics and ideology. The best view is that ideas supplied the language, but hunger, debt and privilege lit the fire.

(b) Marxian socialism as scientific socialism

Marx and Engels claimed the label for a doctrine that rested on the study of society and economy, not on moral appeals, in contrast to what Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880) called the utopian socialism of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon. Its method was historical materialism: the mode of production, the forces and relations of production, forms the base, while law, politics and ideas form a superstructure. History advances through class struggle and through the contradictions of each stage, from primitive communism through slave and feudal societies to capitalism. Das Kapital (1867) offered the theory of surplus value, in which capitalists extract unpaid labour, and predicted concentration of capital, crises and eventual proletarian revolution.

There is merit in the claim. Marxism drew attention to economic structure and class in history, and inspired fruitful work by historians such as Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson. Its analysis of capitalism's crises and inequalities remains influential.

Its scientific status is contested. Its predictions of growing misery and revolution in advanced industrial societies were not borne out, and the revolutions that took place were in Russia and China, which were agrarian. Karl Popper argued that its claims were not falsifiable, and Weber argued that ideas and religion can shape economic life independently. The stage scheme is Eurocentric and fits poorly with cases like the Asiatic mode of production, and economic determinism understates human agency.

The judgement is that Marxism is a powerful explanatory framework and method, but not a science in the sense of the natural sciences with exact laws and predictions.

(c) The Enlightenment: science, humanism and progress

The statement is correct. The scientific revolution supplied the method: Bacon's empiricism, Descartes' rationalism, and Newton's Principia (1687), which suggested that nature and society could be understood by reason.

But the Enlightenment used this method to question human affairs, and humanism was central. Voltaire defended toleration in his Treatise on Toleration (1763), Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments (1764) attacked torture and cruelty, and Rousseau and Kant stressed human dignity and autonomy, Kant defining enlightenment as daring to use one's own reason (1784).

The idea of progress was equally basic. The Encyclopédie aimed to spread knowledge, Turgot and Condorcet argued that humanity could improve through education. Condorcet's Sketch (1795) gave the clearest statement of unlimited progress.

The Enlightenment also had limits, as Herder and Burke objected, and its universalism coexisted with acceptance of slavery and empire. The judgement is that science was only one of its three pillars.