Philsophical & Social Context of Rousseau's Ideas

The research will discuss the philosophical and social context of Rousseau's examination of the sovereignty of religion and then to discuss how the pattern of ideas in Julie and The Social Contract reorganizes and reconciles a commitment to religious belief in a way that conforms currents of Enlightenment thought to the Christian ethical tradition, or more exactly legitimates the sovereignty of a reinterpreted Christianity in an ideal of secular social organization. Rousseau's reorganization of religious themes, especially in Julie, ou La nouvelle HTloise, will be seen to provide a symbolic system meant to use the content of Christian ethical thought to interpret and shape the content of the social and political ethical systems that were being secularized during the Enlightenment.

By the 18th century, the intellectual ground had been prepared for the Enlightenment. The Reformation had long since been successfully employed against the rigidity of the Roman Church, but, by the 18th century, Protestantism had achieved quite as much an institutional authoritarianism as Catholicism, and monarchy remained the principal form of government throughout Europe. But the revolutions in England in 1642, 1660, and 1688 had, after all, traded one absolutist regime for another. Rumblings of social and moral discontent of the later period were to find expression in the American and French Revolutions, and the atmosphere and content of Enlightenment thought and its more flamboyant philosophic

tion of the male teacher/female student relationship, as well as the domestic tale's ultimate faith in marriage." In other words, Rousseau uses the heroine's psychoemotional relationship with her lovers to personify an ideal woman-as-student in Julie, an ideal man-as-mentor in Saint-Preux, and an ideal understanding husband in Wolmar. Julie becomes the modern figure of the historical Heloise, with her distant correspondent the romantic figuration of Abelard. The love between Julie and Saint-Preux is as doomed as that of Heloise and Abelard, but they survive to old age, the tyrannous authority of the church unable to touch them in a secularized, anticlerical France. A good deal of Julie's correspondence deals with formulation of an appropriate concept of God and of human society. It becomes manifest because of the baron's rather peculiar choice of Julie's husband: He is a middle-aged Russian TmigrT and an atheist, and the baron's family is of godfearing Protestant stock. The hostility to Catholicism is therefore a starting point in the original conception of the novel. But Wolmar, who does not complain about Julie's not being a virgin, has an innate piety as well as some little hostility toward institutional religion, particularl

Category: Philosophy - P