APPEARANCES

1690 John Locke's ‘Essay Concern g Human Under and g’ uential across Europe. “By nam g sensory experience as the only genu e source of knowledge, sensation m engendered a su icious attitude toward ab ract theory, which operated at a remove from mediate physical sensation.”

Another Beg n g.

The Enlightenment: What does it mean to be ‘scienti c’?

Descartes (1641): I can doubt everyth g that I th k (even my mo basic beliefs about a th g I am look g at). I can doubt everyth g, except that I am th k g. That where we beg .

Th uence has become a common-sense nearly 60 years later when Diderot says that "bl d people [th k] like mathematicians and mathematicians like bl d people both were unusually pervious to sensory experience, therefore lack g sensibility." Sensibility operates subtly between science and art. When not work g on h encyclopedia he reads a new type of novel - books where noth g was expla ed s ply and purposefully, and no topic was appropriate. For eg, he calls ‘Tr tram Shandy’ the “madde , the w e , the gaye of all books.”

By the early 1800s there a "poetic revolution" Europe. Writers like Flaubert and Balzac break with the old literary reg e (with "high genres, devoted to the itation of noble actions and characters and low genres devoted to common people and base subject matters"). Vico (who wrote ‘New Science’) derides the old ways as "the language of childhood". In the new real t writ g the moral a of the characters no longer clear, whereas all sense pressions, all prosaic activities are cluded, like an encyclopedia lay g bare "the character of a t e or a society". They expla everyday "realities as phantasmagorias bear g witness to the hidden truth of a society". Th k d of attention to th gs "that seems obvious at r glance but actually prove[] to be a fabric of hieroglyphs and a puzzle of theological quibbles" becomes the bas of "sociological terpretation”. Which lits to two - (1) University Sociology (à la Locke): Durkhe 's re ection on 'social facts' and (2) Metasociology (à la Descartes): Marx's analys of commodities: "A commodity appears, at r sight, a very trivial th g, and easily under ood."

H

“What a nation? It a body of associates liv g under a common law, represented by the same leg lature, etc” ... Today when for the r t e tory, the People are set to become ' akeholders' the sovereign authority of the State, there are “three que ions that we have to ask of ourselves:

1. What the People? – Everyth g.

2. What, until now, has it been the ex t g political order? – Noth g.

3. What does it want to be? – Someth g.”

Equality as the Promise of a New Common

In 1789, The French Revolution affirmed that there was a generic humanity to everyone who was present in the nation, no matter how different. Traditional-authority in the old regime (ancien regime) was vested in the Priestly Estate (religious-social power) and the Nobles (political-religious power). These were institutions of hereditary inequality. The challenge to the principle of inequality was articulated in a popular pamphlet ‘What is the Third Estate‘ (or ‘People’) written and circulated by Abbé Sieyès (a clergyman!). 'The People' demanded representatives free of “superstitious respect” for these traditionally privileged orders, and with an equal voice, to sit beside the existing decision-makers in the Estates General.

The Revolution became not ju an objective age of change, but it also became a subjective force of change; it became a subjective prescr tion of change: “I am French, but I am go g to go somewhere else and ght for the sake of these values which are for everyone”. It creates an awareness of h tory itself be g a common pr c le [where change for all happens]

The Revolution in France opened access to the highest offices in the State to anyone who could prove their ability. Seizing upon this historic opportunity, the son of a minor nobleman from Corsica rose rapidly through the Army's ranks to become a military commander. By 1799, Napoléon Bonaparte embarked on a series of military campaigns in violation of the peace that had reigned on the continent since the Treaty of Westphalia. In every territory they annexed, they abolished the old aristocratic codes and set up liberalised puppet States. Napoléonic France was linking the territories of Western Europe into a federal imperium capable of countering the global power of British Capital. And at the same time transmitting the modern institutional values of the Revolution (homogeneity, transparency, legibility). In reaction there arose “German and even Italian unification. And the various European imperialisms that subsequently emerged ultimately gave birth to nationstates around the globe.” * Key References:

Soumyabrata Choudhury

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