Currents of Thought Regarding the Rule of Law. The “Rationalist” School and the Social Contract
Currents of Thought Regarding the Rule of Law. The “Rationalist” School and the Social Contract

Summary/Abstract: Among its most prominent representatives, Réné Déscartes, a special personality, characterizing himself as „full of enthusiasm", discovering the foundations of an admirable science", it lays the foundations of modernity, a science that places man at the center of scientific and philosophical concerns. If antiquity pays special attention to collectivity, man being only a means to achieve its goals, for modernity, the goal is man. The true orientation towards self-knowledge begins with Déscartes, through that famous maxim "cogito ergo sum" (I think therefore I exist) which highlights human reason and aims to place man at the center of the entire universe. It is established with Déscartes, legal formalism, and this because its philosophy eliminates any possibility of a given reality imposing itself as such. Déscartes' cogito is therefore the expression of the existence of a fortress that cannot be invaded by the collectivity and the human interiority that is revealed to be foreign to any social inclusion. In other words, "the irreducibility of the individual and the social is constituted in the reason for Déscartes' silence on the political”. However, it can be seen in his work how "he fights tyranny and supports the legitimate monarchy in its absolutist sense”.

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