1 FAILURE OF ENLIGHTENMENT AND MODERNITY IN CONSTRUCTION OF HAPPINESS AND HUMAN PROGRESS Fernando Alcoforado * There were two great events in human history that brought much hope that it would be commencing the construction of a New World and a New Man. The first major event concerns the Enlightenment and the second, to the birth of Modernity. With the Enlightenment, it was expected to prevail tolerance, humanism and respect for nature and assert the right to liberty and equality among men. With Modernity, was expected the society would reach, in turn, uninterrupted progress for the benefit of humanity through the development of science and technology. It should be noted that the Enlightenment is the name given to the ideology that was being developed and built by the bourgeoisie in Europe from the revolutionary struggles of the late eighteenth century whose themes revolve around the Freedom, Progress and Man. The Enlightenment was intended to correct the inequalities in society and guarantee the rights of the individual considered natural, such as freedom and the free ownership of assets. The Enlightenment humanism of the eighteenth century have proposed that the human being and his dignity were the center and the fundamental value of all sciences, imposing also to be the paramount concern of all laws of any legal system. The Enlightenment provided the motto of the French Revolution (Liberty, Equality and Fraternity) and fertilized to the extent that his followers were opposed to injustice, religious intolerance and absolutism privileges. However, since the French Revolution to the present time, the Enlightenment political promises were abandoned around the world with the adoption of inhumane practices increasingly sophisticated by governments and imperialist by the major capitalist powers, the outbreak of 3 World Wars (World War 1, World War 2 and the Cold War), the advent of fascism and Nazism, carrying out military interventions and implementation of coups d´etat in several countries around the world. The Enlightenment political theses failed since the English Revolution (1640), the American Revolution (1776) and the French Revolution (1789). This failure paved the way for the advent of Marxist ideology in the world that it intended to take a step forward from the Enlightenment seeking an end to exploitation of man by man with the reduction of economic inequalities between social classes and in the future, its complete abolition. The facts of history show that the Enlightenment theories that guided the bourgeois revolutions in the eighteenth century and Marxist theories under which the socialist revolutions were carried out in the twentieth century failed because they did not fulfill their promises of historical achievement of human happiness. Modernity, in turn, was born with the Industrial Revolution meaning an extraordinary intellectual effort of Enlightenment thinkers to develop science and reason and discover the universal laws to be put to the service of humanity. With the Industrial Revolution, science and technology have gained fundamental importance to human progress through continuous technological innovations. The idea was to use the accumulation of knowledge generated in search of human emancipation and the enrichment of daily life. It is worth noting that the First Industrial Revolution was the set of socioeconomic upheavals that began around 1760 in England (and later in other countries), and especially characterized by the replacement of man by machine (mechanical loom and