Modernity & Monarchy

The rebellious idealization of ancient liberties was perhaps most famously captured by a page in the Confessions in which Rousseau credited his “indomptable” “esprit libre et républicain” to his early and enthusiastic reading of the classics: “ever contemplating Rome and Athens; living, so to speak, with their great men, [...] I believed myself Greek or Roman; I believed myself the character whose life I read.” Whether or not the French revolution was indeed inspired, as Chateaubriand claimed (followed by Constant and Marx), by thinkers “living more in Rome and Athens than in their own country, [who] sought to revive in Europe the ways of antiquity,” the power of the ancient countermodel to modern monarchy was certainly a hallmark of the generations that succeeded the quarrel.

Epistemology · Modernity · Monarchy · Political science · Politics · European Political History Analysis · Law · Philosophy