POL320Y1 Lecture Notes - Age Of Enlightenment, Baruch Spinoza, Public Sphere
Document Summary
There has been a continuous intellectual line of books being read, we are in the process of figuring out what the story is. One way of telling the story is that rationality is born with plato, and the dominant strand is the development of rationalism, the ancient form of reason is very different than the modern one. Machiavelli is the turning point that something happens and then builds to modernity. We put the division at hobbes and then start pol320 with rousseau. Modernity is the creation of a certain culture, when we use the term modern we are referring to a historic trajectory that happened in a specific place, and we are here today because of it. It is important to understand that it is not world" political thought, but rather specific to one culture and tradition. It happens to be our tradition, we live in the west and everything is the product of this tradition (education, culture, etc. ,).
