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understanding’ (V: 919) . It was the scientists’ and the materialists’ propensity to ‘reason without understanding’ which more than anything else was Rousseau’s indictment of the philosophy of modernity. Rousseau, the philosopher of the sensible heart, knew that man was a sensitive being (an insight he passed on to the likes of Shelley, Byron, Hölderlin, Mozart and Goethe), and this insight formed the core idea in his political philosophy. Politics (as the science of what ought to be) was grounded in ethics, and ethics could never be but an academic matter. Philosophical
can no longer rely is metonymic of a spiritual or existential crisis. Boundaries are also drawn on the basis of misunderstandings, modernity contrasting with quaintness, linguistic misunderstandings and ignorance. These are illustrated in the following exchange between Rennie and a local politician when the small aeroplane in which they are travelling lands at the St Antoine airstrip
more gently sloping, though as it faces the Atlantic it is exposed to the north-east trade winds and heavy swells. The urban landscape, meanwhile, constitutes the island’s paradoxical encounter with modernity. At the western end of the town, before the climb towards the leeward coast, are the island’s historical Botanical Gardens, among the oldest in the western hemisphere. Their 21 acres (8.5 ha) remain
). However Rousseau, the lamenter of modernity and secularism (c.f. the Discourse sur les sciences et les arts), concedes that a civic religion ‘can be no longer’ (III: 469). Christianity, the only credible candidate, has ruled itself out. Not because he is opposed to Christianity – which he calls ‘a holy, sublime and real religion’ (‘sainté. Sublime, Chap004.p65 80 11/09/03, 13:35 A civic profession of faith 81 véritable’) (III: 465) – but because its teaching of a kingdom of another world makes it unsuitable as a means of achieving political cohesion, which is the
:34 54 The political philosophy of Rousseau at the end of the Middle Ages in the Northern Italian city-state cradles of modernity. Marsilius has, rightly or wrongly, been seen as an early democrat; a champion of populism in an age of clerical despotism. This, however, was not his main contribution. His seminal contribution to the history of political thought was that he instituted man (whether individually or collectively) as the law-giver. The ruler should legislate – not merely adjudicate. The law was not static, God-given; it was to be made by men responding to a