Reclaiming Rousseau: National and European Identity
Résumé
This contribution will highlight the way in which Rousseau is used among civic nationalists
or national-republicans who claim the value of national identity for individuals to
lead meaningful lives, and argue for the necessity of a cultural, pre-political identity, while
denying the possibility of a European Republic. We will focus on recent work by Charles
Taylor and Vincent Descombes: both their interpretations of collective identity are rooted
in the assumed relationship between the national ethos and democracy, excluding Habermas’s
account of a post-national European democracy. In order to challenge their view,
we shall draw from Rousseau’s work theoretical resources that have been underestimated
so far: his writings on the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, which offer a dialectical account of the
relationship between European political identity and its cultural identity.