Repository logo
 

From the Hebrew Commonwealth to Party Politics: Rousseau's Legacy and the Nation-State in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Sonenscher, Michael 

Abstract

jats:pWhen, why and how did the subjects of individual and national self-determination come to overlap and what were the effects of this overlap when it occurred? Usually in the history of European political thought, the subject of self-determination is associated with the concept of autonomy, while the subject of national self-determination is associated with the concept of the nation-state. The aim of this article is to examine the relationship between these two concepts mainly in the light of an earlier tension between the concepts of the people and of the nation as agents of political authorization and between Roman law and the legacy of Monarchomach thought particularly, but not exclusively, in eighteenth-century France. It is designed to show of how this cluster of tensions was described and discussed first by Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, and then, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by such figures as Mill, Tocqueville, Bluntschli, Bosanquet, Hauriou, Schmitt and Strauss. The point of the article is to suggest that the modern, two-sided, relationship between parties and states is more of a continuation of the earlier conceptual relationship between nations and peoples than is usually assumed.</jats:p>

Description

Keywords

43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 44 Human Society, 4303 Historical Studies, 50 Philosophy and Religious Studies, 4408 Political Science

Journal Title

Modern Intellectual History

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1479-2443
1479-2451

Volume Title

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)