Abstract

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