What was needed instead was a revolution led by poets and artists like Shelley and his friends. Then, he believed, humanity would achieve the future Kant had foreseen, a world of perpetual peace and harmony. Mankind would witness the overthrow of intellectual as well as political tyranny and the establishment of the rights of man and—with a nod to Mary Wollstonecraft—the rights of woman. The dream that had haunted the Platonic imagination since Saint Augustine, of an Eternal City united by love and equality and justice, would be realized, with the poets (as opposed to God or the theologians)
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