Enlightenment, Law and Nature: Montesquieu and Rousseau

Abstract

The concept of tradition has played a vital role in the composition of modern political identities. In an important sense, to be a radical is to desire a revolt against tradition, to seek the emancipation of people from mystical obligations to dead generations, releasing in them a full recognition of the boundless potential for change and innovation that is inherent in human nature. In contrast, the conservative disposition involves an affirmation of the dependent character of man. Without the practical wisdom that is bequeathed to one generation by its predecessors, a wisdom founded on the misfortunes and triumphs of immemorial experience, man becomes subjected to his most base and savage instincts. Social order is sacrificed on the altar of a ‘liberty’ conceived in ignorance of the dangers and vicissitudes of the human condition. Yet it would be a mistake to represent this dispute over tradition as definitive of the entire history of political thought. The formation of modern political identities required that before tradition could become an object of contestation, it had to be invented. The modern concept of ‘tradition’ was both founded in and, at the same moment, repudiated by the European Enlightenment. In such a way, the Enlightenment as an intellectual and social movement crafted the vocabulary of modern political life in a plenary rethinking of the form and substance of human history.