ABSTRACT
A new humanism provides a new jurisprudence. The idea of a 'universal' jurisprudence has been out of fashion for two centuries. The age of positivism has crushed any wistful remembrances of an 'age of gold'. Now, however, there is a discernible sense that the time for recollection has arrived, the time, perhaps, for a renaissance in legal and political humanism. Writing in the immediate wake of the First World War, the English poet and critic Herbert Read resolved that the 'human spirit' must be retrieved from its 'attitude' of 'despair'. He was tempted by all kinds of ideology: sydicalist, communist, socialist. Read's anxious romanticism captured the mood of a generation. Another, perhaps more famous, articulation was Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus. Camus described the fate of Sisyphus, condemned 'to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight'.
