Dominique-Joseph GARAT (1749-1833), philosopher and politici - Lot 258

Lot 258
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1200 - 1500 EUR
Dominique-Joseph GARAT (1749-1833), philosopher and politici - Lot 258
Dominique-Joseph GARAT (1749-1833), philosopher and politician, member of the French Academy (1803). Autograph manuscript, 8 pp. very large folio (46 x 30 cm) on strong paper, [1778]. Corrections in the text and additions in the margin. Important and very interesting article on Robertson's History of America, and on Montesquieu, partly published in the Mercure de France of Sept. 25, 1778, pretext for a philosophical discussion on the wild man. The whole beginning of the text was not published; and perhaps the end. Journalists," says M. de Montesquieu, "begin by praising the nature that is treated; first blandness. The highest praise given to this new work of M. Robertson, would have seemed to M. de Montesquieu a very simple and natural thing. The author of the Spirit of the Laws would have seen at first glance the grandeur and beauty of this subject, and there is no doubt that he felt more than once in the course of the twenty years of meditation that his great work cost him, that he lacked a good history of America, and that Europe lacked one []. Politics, in order to search for the principles of the constitutive laws of society, and the best forms of government, has transported its imagination around the oak tree where the savages deliberate the plans of a hunt or the brigandages of a war; the moralist has wished to live with them in their huts and under their huts, to find the rule of our duties, and the example of the virtues that he wants to prescribe, in the way in which the savages live with their children and their companions; all the philosophers finally have been tempted to go to seek them in their forests to be enlightened in front of their ignorance and to surprise the truth in their first ideas []".
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