Rousseau in the Wake of Montesquieu's: historical imagination and political theorization

Author(s)

Renato Moscateli

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
• Defense date: 2009-11-08

Examining board members

José Oscar de Almeida Marques; Antonio Carlos dos Santos; João Carlos Kfouri Quartim de Moraes; Maria das Graças de Souza; Natalia Maruyama

• Advisor: José Oscar de Almeida Marques

Abstract

When Montesquieu and Rousseau are laid side by side as political thinkers, it is usual to oppose them as if the first had just studied laws as they existed in order to explain them according to the real situations in which they were generated, and the second had only looked for what laws should be in order to fulfill human needs. One would have, therefore, on the one side, a Montesquieu too concerned with the historicity of human institutions to be able to elaborate a true theory on the foundations of political right, and, on the other, a Rousseau hostile to history and dedicated to ideal formulations about politics. There are, however, good reasons to question that opposition, which can be done by applying a comparative methodology to Montesquieu's and Rousseau's reflections on history and politics, paying attention to the sometimes open, but often implicit, dialogue undertook by the Geneva's philosopher with the current of political thought whose central problems and propositions are laid out in the work of Montesquieu. Thus, the aim of this research is to analyze Rousseau's work in the wake of Montesquieu's legacy, in order to show that it is wrong to interpret it narrowly in terms of a mere opposition to the kind of approach characteristic of the author of The Spirit of Laws. More specifically, what is sought here is to understand how the system of causality ascribed by the French philosopher to history was somehow incorporated by Rousseau into his own reflections, which are here investigated in order to show that they make use of a interpretative and discursive model that allows to build representations of interconnected events in a coherent way. Moreover, it will be shown how the theory of the forms of government presented in Rousseau's work, his conception of the institutions that promote civil freedom, as well as his understanding of the reasons that lead to moral and political corruption throughout the history of States, owe something to the reading of baron of La Brède's texts. The objective, in short, is to show that there are much more points in common between the ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau than it is usually recognized (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 05/02751-7 - Rousseau in the wake of Montesquieu’s legacy: historical imagination and political theorization
• Grantee: Renato Moscateli
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate