LINO RIZZI

Religione civile e laicitą in Rousseau 

N. 178

Summary — This study of   Rousseau’s "civil religion" takes as its starting point Tocqueville’s claim that there can be neither society nor common actions without common fundamental ideas. This leads to an exploration of the Rousseauian idea of civil religion not in terms of a suspicion of all links between politics and religion, but in terms of an awareness that religion constitutes a powerful motivation towards political association. The aim is to understand the following problem posed by Rousseau: why should religion be "civil" religion and not " political " or "state " religion? The answer is that Rousseau does not intend religion to be a public cult, as is the case for the Jacobins, but a cult which is "internal" to the citizen, and which serves as a bridge between the rights of the citizen within the state and the rights of man which transcend states. The model citizen is not "secular" in the sense of being areligious, but is a " theist ". He believes, that is, in a God without symbols, because all references to a positive religion would subordinate the conscience to a particular confession, to the exclusion of the others. Theism is necessary in order to guarantee a "moral code", that is, the tolerance of all cults, with the exception of those that are intolerant. Among the latter Rousseau includes Catholicism, thus laying the basis for the church reforms that culminated in the Constitution civile du clergé, which assigned the powers of a council to a political assembly.