La modernité politique de la Révolution française

• Main Author: Jacques Guilhaumou
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Casa de Velázquez 2006-04-01
• Series: Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez
• Subjects: Discourse; French Revolution; Individual; Kant; Modernity/Anti-modernity; Sieyès
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/mcv/2262

This article addresses the way in which the dialectic of continuity and rupture may prove to be heuristic, particularly in the case of so radical an event as the French Revolution. To that end we propose an investigation into the history of concepts at the beginning of modern times, of civic humanism from the Renaissance to the French Revolution. The idea is to take into consideration a whole series of new figures which developed at the time of the emergence of the modern individual: the citizen in the City versus the Prince, of course, but also the legislator/prophet versus the virtuous individual, the engineer versus the practical philosopher, the orator versus the legislator/philosopher, etc. In this succession of figures the French Revolution occupies a central place thanks to the ultimate invention of the political metaphysics of the individual/nation. This invention then passed through the interpretation of the German philosophers of the time of the Revolution, essentially Humboldt, Kant and Fichte. In short, what we seek to achieve is to place the forward vision of the French Revolution within a metaphysics of the subject, along with that part of it that recognised the dignity of the self.