In studying the timelessness of Rousseau’s political scheme, perhaps the most fertile starting point is Rousseau’s vast autobiographical project. Not only does it furnish the investigator with many illuminating and disturbing bookmarks in his journey through life, it is also a rich pool of his personal attitudes to time. His desperate need to explain himself to his time, defend his past, to both create and annul his future, has left to history an awesome testament to self-understanding, or indeed self-deception. These works represent the headstone that Rousseau composed for himself. They are the legacy and memory he wished to bequeath...

How radical was Rousseau’s breach with his contemporaries? Exactly how divergent was the prize essay on the Arts and Sciences from the general tenor of eighteenth-century society? To gauge this it is necessary to understand what Rousseau was fortifying himself against. What was the major force of his day to which he objected so forcefully? For Cassirer, the eighteenth century had an “innate thirst for knowledge, an insatiable intellectual curiosity.”¹ The amazing advances in the arts and sciences over the previous two centuries and the flowering of an intellectual climate unrivaled in history bequeathed to the eighteenth century not just...

Rousseau gave intimations of the world of nature he was to open up in the “First Discourse” when he mused, “We cannot reflect on the morality of mankind without contemplating with pleasure the picture of simplicity which prevailed in the earliest times. This image may be justly compared to a beautiful coast, adorned only by the hands of nature; towards which our eyes are constantly turned, and which we see receding with regret.”¹

One can barely imagine a more powerful expression of loss. It is understandable that he could persuade himself to compose the “Second Discourse” from the perspective of...

The Social Contract is Rousseau’s crowning work of political influence. Its preeminence comes not only from its influence in the realm of political theory, but also its moment of influential grace during one of European history’s most intemperate events. It is an incongruous phenomenon that one of political theory’s most timeless constructions could have had such a momentous and timely moment of prestige in the French Revolution. The forlorn histories, the temporal despairing, the search for origins, and the raging against the present that I have discussed so far have their final moment of transcendence in the theoretical purity of...

What must first be acknowledged when turning to Karl Marx and his project’s relation to time and history is that he was a thinker avowedly committed to temporality, and that his corpus is built directly on the agency of history for its fruition. Compared with Rousseau, Marx unflinchingly faces, even embraces, the pernicious reality of time. And unlike Rousseau, a firm argument can be made that he is a theorist who thought seriously on the problems of history. Thus it becomes difficult to attempt to align Marx’s thought with a timelessness that creates an illusory historical picture of reality. We...

My discussion of Rousseau began with the works of his later life in order to strip back a philosophy that attempts to push society into a regained childhood. Contrarily, Marx’s youthful life can give us the direction to discuss his mission of dragging the human species into adulthood. Where for Rousseau society had lost the enthusiasm and simplicity of its youth, for Marx society had been kept in an enforced state of immaturity, unable to grow up from its alienated supervision. This is not a flippant analogy when one considers that Rousseau found his philosophical feet late in life, where...

In a speech delivered at the anniversary of the “People’s Paper,” Marx outlined the rupture of history, which had produced such a lamentable state of wealth and inequality, progress and deepening failure.

There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific processes which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the later times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems...

Despite Marx’s supposed position on the radical temporality of all individuals and ideas, Marx himself and the type of science he was forging were not subjected to such a limitation. In typical nineteenth-century style, Marx made his social scientist stand outside time and history. From this perspective much of Marx’s insistence on everything being embedded in time and history seems to be a way of depreciating the claims of his opponents. Timelessness is a branding iron used like a weapon to protect Marx and his claims from similar accusations. This begs the important question of where precisely the Marxist scientist,...

Kant’s timeless will, the foundation of all modern emancipatory political projects, was such a powerfully endowed conception of human thought and judgment that it was inevitable that that activity would seek itself out and subject itself to the treatment that it inflicts upon the world. Critique allows nothing to remain solid and unquestioned, as it is obedient to nothing but itself. When such activity solidifies its initially variable and flexible nature into a rigid constellation of thought over the course of time, it is inevitable that its original impulse will rise above its institutionalized pretense and question its capabilities for...

By way of introduction, it is helpful to observe the grander historical elements of Foucault’s early archaeological project before delving into its more nuanced architecture. This will provide a framework for a later discussion of the inner workings of Foucauldian history. If we accept that Foucault’s is no less a project of freedom and critique than Kant’s, then, by comparing their differing positioning of the major themes of epistemology and morality, we are able very quickly to discern Foucault’s early understanding of history. What is beyond doubt is that knowledge and freedom are the major concerns of these thinkers. Foucault...

Let us approach the problem of history more from Foucault’s direction. Perhaps his spatial history is no random illusion of it, but instead a kind of perverse heightening and intensification of history in order to provoke the carrier of its message. History is turned upside down and fragmented as though it is an accusation against those who made it. Like a disturbed self-mutilator who cuts himself to know of his existence, Foucault dissects history—cutting it up to know that it lives, to see the blood flow from its brittle skin of progress, succession, and continuity, and thus to source...

In this concluding chapter on Foucault, I wish to examine the thinker’s readmission of the free activity of the self into his imaginative rationale, where before it had been conspicuously absent. The term “imaginative rationale” is carefully chosen so as not to overplay the reemergence of this figure in Foucault’s theoretical and conceptual edifice. The radically skeptical construction of history that Foucault had built throughout his archaeological and genealogical development is in no way conceptually crowned with the spire of the self. I will show that Foucault never gives the self a definitive form. In fact he characterizes it as...

The argument of this book has from the outset viewed Kant as a thinker whose critical philosophy has opened a wide and complex space for political thought and endeavor. It takes seriously the claim that practical reason is the lynchpin to the whole enterprise, rising to primary importance over theoretical reason in Kant’s own estimation of critiques and humanity’s purpose. As such, this book has given crucial weight to the role of Rousseau in the formation of Kant’s critical project as the founding moral and political spirit of his critical universe. The analytical tradition of concerning oneself with the epistemological...