Abstract

This essay is an examination of what political place is, how it may be described or prescribed, to what degree it is a place derivative of reason, imagination, or both. Such themes are investigated through the writings of Giambattista Vico and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The essay pursues and analyzes the topos of verum-factum, the place of the convertibility of true and made, first explicitly enunciated in the writings of Vico. Vico's writings are shown to constitute a topology and ontology of place; this place is discussed as the originary topos of human freedom and expression. The works of Rousseau are discussed as an extension or development of the Vichian sense of human place. Rousseau's contribution is to call our attention to and to recall our involvements toward the formation of our place as the creation of the body politic. Rousseau shows us that the crucial to the true body politic is the creation and maintenance of its ressort, the conflictual-elasticity whereby the members of the body politic introplay, introrelate with each other and with all that is. We discuss the images for the body politic which Rousseau employs to depict the creation of such conflictual-elasticity and then show that the particular embodiments of his images, i.e., property and law, are not adequately developed by him. We discuss his consideration of the body politic in terms of the question of revolution in order to develop the contribution he has made to the expression of the human topos beyond his limited terms of analysis. Having explored human topos in Vico and Rousseau as the originary place of freedom and expression via the formation of the body politic, we attempt to go beyond their analyses, albeit building upon them, so as to establish a prospectus on political philosophy, in relation to philosophic reflection and engagement, that is of contemporary significance