MAURO BARBERIS

L'ombra dello stato. Sieyès e le origini rivoluzionarie dell'idea di nazione

N. 159

Summary — Among the concepts for which the political talk of the modern West differentiates from all the others, of the present and of the past, there is also the one of nation. Although already thematized in the Seventies by authors as Herder and Rousseau, the concept of nation finds what can be held as its paradigmatic elaboration at the dawn of the French revolution, in the work of Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès. In terms of "nation " Sieyès, as it is well-known, constructs an image of the political and of the social opposed to those common in the ancien régime: an image bound to assert itself, following the Great Revolution, as authentic common sense. After having analyzed the various aspects of the Sieyèsian conceptualization, and in particular of its connection with modern individualism, we are asking ourselves in what consists its specific evidence: in what it corresponds to the common experience of a French man of the times of Sieyès. The answer to this question is that the concept of nation refers to the experience of the modern centralized State, asserting itself in France through the monarchic absolutism; of this specific experience the idea of nation constitutes so to speak the shadow, the conceptual projection. The great paradox of the revolutionary talk before, of the liberal one after, consists just in this: it avails itself against the absolutistic State, just of the ideas - individual, civil society, nation - to whose formation this had contributed in a determining way.