3No Bad Genres: The Undisciplined Disciples of the French Enlightenment

What can a political theorist learn from a literary critic, and vice versa, when studying authors who have contributed to both traditions? In our paper we will undertake an interdisciplinary analysis of three multi-disciplinary French authors, Montesquieu and Rousseau from the 18th Century and Benjamin Constant from the early 19th. Our analysis of these authors is a developmental step in a larger collaborative project: the design of a learning community in our college’s general education program. This learning community will center around a pair of integrated, fully team-taught courses, one on French literature and one on political theory. The theme of the courses will be the “Rise and Fall of the Modern Individual, ” and it will survey literary and political texts from the 17th through the 19th centuries. For the purposes of this paper, however, we would like to concentrate on the middle of the story, because the atmosphere of the French Enlightenment produced authors who were both literary creators and political theorists. At a crucial juncture in the emergence of modernity, the multi-genre authors of the Enlightenment illustrate the potentials and pitfalls of the modern individual. The "modern individual " shows up in the literary text on two levels: that of the creato