The One That Got Away

For several years now I have indulged myself in a kind of academic hobby. I have been interested in persons whose actual living experience may affect their thinking, that is, who have both a systematic thought pattern and an openness to political and social conditions. As a means of getting at this openness, I have used human cataclysms, wars and revolutions, as tracers. I have collected the cases of Grotius and Pufendorf and the Thirty Years War, Hobbes and the Puritan Revolution, Kant and Hegel and the French Revolution, Marx and Engels and the European Revolution of 1848, Russell, Whitehead, and Meineke and the First World War, and John-Paul Sartre and World War II. To my surprise, the fragmenting of devices and conditions of politics and society has resulted in tightening up rather than loosening the systems. This appears to have worked through the transformation of political and social experience into contemporary history and the attachment of history in this form to the system. Only Rene Descartes does not live up to his representative function, that is, his function of representing the rising bourgeoisie. For although he represented individualism in action, he did not represent it in a political and social way.' Descartes's experience of social and political conditions was consciously directed. He participated in the Thirty Years War, joining first the army of Prince Maurice of Nassau, and then of Maximilian of Bavaria.