Politcal Symbols of Climate: Bodin, Montesquieu, Rousseau

My dissertation studies the discursive and performative functions of climactic determinism, a theory that explains human diversity as the natural effect of geographical influence. In a corpus which spans the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, I discover a common idiom in the famous "climate theories" of early modern France: representations of climate in Bodin, Montesquieu and Rousseau act as rhetorical straw men in which the scientificity of the discourse creates a veil for the expression of political thought and its controversies. Following a trajectory which leads from absolute to popular sovereignty, the role of climates is to stylize and reorganize different sociopolitical forces of the French kingdom. Beyond relativism and scientific validity, they reveal meta-juridical finalities of which the complexity is clarified through external metaphors. I show how the diverse reconfigurations of the "geography of others" reveals a social commentary of the philosopher, who reduces the components of a society into an imaginative and experimental schema.Ph.D.2016-11-30 00:00:0