Artistic and Political Enthusiasts 
 

Jean Jacques Rousseau, the Frenchman who is called "the father of romanticism," asserted that freedom and self-expression was a requirement of human nature. He gave the cause of freedom, in art and in politics, an emotional content that Voltaire and other leaders of the enlightenment had ignored. For Rousseau, human rights were paramount. Rousseau's influence continued to spread throughout Europe after his death in 1778. Politically and in many other respects Germany at the beginning of the 1700s was quite "backward." In the 1740s Prussia's King Frederick the Great and other forward-looking Germans had welcomed the Enlightenment, which helped to free German society from mass of medieval attitudes and institutions. King Frederick the Great initiated significant reforms; for example, he rationalized the army by standardizing drill and encouraged his court to base its administration on the "universal" principles of enlightened philosophy.

Artists in Exile 

Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand 

Writers are not always divorced from reality. Throughout history, novelists and political philosophers lived lives which parallelled the political crises of the day. One of the earliest Western examples is the life of Socrates. His political teaching and social commentary, particularly his views on religion, led to rebuke from the politically powerful comics (such as Euripedes) and ultimately, the citizenry. He paid the highest cost, his life. 

During the French Revolution a young writer, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand sought to remove religious barriers which severely restricted the freedoms of the poor, uneducated masses. Hence, those in the arts were as politically active as those at the forefront of the rebellions. Artists can profoundly alter our collective lives as citizens and our individual lives as humans. Their words and images can be powerful instruments for change, not only culturally but politically as well.

Cultural Truths 
 

Truth, goodness and beauty--Israel's tents--were to William Blake, more important and more true than what an ancient Greek had thought about the composition of matter or what Newton's theories asserted as to the physical character of light. Newton had looked outward for truth; Blake looked inward. Blake said, "Mental things are alone real....Nobody knows of its dwelling place." Few romantics became such explicit idealists, but most of them shared with Blake the belief that the artist's activity created truth out of his or her own vision; therefore, Blake's perspective identifies a role for the artist which is very different from that which is assigned to a scientist who is to report truth conveyed to him by observation of objects or events.

Justifying Cultural Meanings of Those in Power 
 

"How does the poet speak to men with power, but by being still more a man than they?"                        -Thomas Carlyle. 1795-1881. 

The above images, all from early Mesopotamia, show how art is often put to the task of justifying the cultural meanings of the positions of those in power. To establish that the rule of the group or individual in power is beneficial, right, and necessary --or at least unavoidable--is a problem for elites in all societies. In the figures above far left and right, the rulers of an early city-state in Sumer are shown in quasi-religious roles. On the left, a Sumerian ruler is shown pouring a libation or sacrificial gift-offering to the gods; the symbolism, or intended cultural meaning, is that the ruler stands before the gods on behalf of the community. At right, another Sumerian ruler stands in the posture of reverent and prayerful obedience before the gods-- a similar intent to link the ruler to religion in the cultural meaning system is involved. In the center, the intent is even more explicit: Hamurabi, king of Babylon 
(c. 1750 BCE), stands before Shamash, the Babylonian god associated with justice, to receive the laws which govern the community. The famous code of laws associated with Hamurabi is incised on the stone just below the image. The inscription makes explicit the message in the image: the gods have called the king to establish justice and order; whoever disobeys the king disobeys the gods.  

These three examples of the way early state rulers depicted themselves give acute insights into the cultural significance involved in governmental systems. In each of these three cases, the artist --probably at the direction of the ruler or the ruler's aides--is attempting to establish a cultural association between the ruler's position and the values of religious sanctity. While these examples are from Mesopotamia, site of the world's earliest states, the basic ideas represented appear to be typical of early states in general.  
 

A Meeting Place of Minds 
 

Great cities attract great minds: Athens in the 4th century B.C.; Rome in the new millenium; Venice during the reign of the Medici family; Paris in the 1800s and again in the early 1900s. 

Leaders of the enlightenment such as Voltaire and Diderot met to discuss philosophy, art and politics. The emotional turbulence of the revolutionary decades around 1800 marked a radical change in the arts. The power of mass emotions, such as nationalism and social struggle, courted Romanticism into the heart of human affairs, individually and collectively, politically and culturally. In Germany, romanticism was generally paired with the "conservative" defense of tradition and authority. In France, Romanticism was expressed by those who were rebellious and "leftist." 

The new scientific spirit, highly mathematical, had combined with the special elements of the Renaissance which had drawn from Greek and Roman antiquity with their emphasis on order, clarity, poise, moderation and restraint. The artistic result of this marriage between science and the arts appears in: the geometry of formal gardens; in the studied elegance of 18th century architecture; in paintings which stress balance of composition and clarity of representation; and in the explicit, logical structure of Haydn's or Mozart's music.

Links 

HNet Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
CogWeb: Cognitive Cultural Studies 
Center for the Cognitive Science of Metaphor Online 
Constructions of the Mind- Artificial intelligence and the humanities. 
Cognitive Science, Humanities and the Arts- A collection and collaborative bibliography on film, literature, the fine arts, as  well as listings of journals and websites. 
Cognition and Literature- Interactive discussion forum hosted by the Society for Critical Exchange. 
An Introduction to Literary Criticism 
Literarture, Cognition and the Brain 
Mental Metaphor Databank- A compilation of various metaphors used to figure mind and cognition, drawn from literary and other sources. 
Reader-Response Research: Empirical research on literary reading at the University of Alberta, Canada. 
Mind and Language 
PSYCHE An electronic refereed journal dedicated to supporting the interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of consciousness and its relation to the brain. 
Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems: An interdisciplinary quarterly concerned with the analogy, and relationships and social activities related to technology, politics, ideologies, literature, art, customs, and culture. 
Lexical Diffusion and Language Drift 
Cultural Selection and Language 
World Scripture: A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts 
Alex E-texts: an extensive catalogue of electronic texts of the internet 
Author's Pen: tools for locating authors on the internet including interviews and biographies 
Contemporary Postcolonial Literature: a well-documented overview of post-colonial and post-imperial English literature 
Shakespeare Web: guide to Shakespeare's plays and other literary works 
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare 
The Camelot Project - Arthurian texts, images, and info 
Poetry.com: International poetry links 
Literary Calendar:  Literary Hyper-Calender provides significant events in literary history 
Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition 
David Washburn's Homepage Hebrew and Greek Grammar 
Ethnologue 
The Human Languages Page (Tyler Jones) 
Travlang's Translating Dictionaries 
Interpreting Ancient Manuscripts Web 
Language Conference Schedules 
Literary Resources on the Net 
LSU "Webliography:" Literature 
A Web of On-Line Grammars 
Writer's Reference Online