Keywords

• In opposition to positivist
• contextualist or sociologist approaches to politics
• this article proposes a perspective of intellectual history
• which aims at working on the historicity of the discourses and the practices. That means that
• instead of privileging the structures and of defining a â€
• œ
• contextâ€
• 
• which is supposed to make the texts comprehensible
• one should consider the texts as generating the meaning themselves
• this approach involves focusing on the events
• and deconstructing the dominant discourse in order to highlight the conflicts of interpretation. This should compel the historians to recognize the capacity of the Roman society to alteronomy
• i.e. to tolerate revolutions and ruptures
• but also the attempt of a part of the elite
• at the end of the Republic
• to stop this dynamism. Two examples are developed: the divergent uses the concept of res publica
• and the development of rationalisation in all domains. The end of the article addresses the issue of how to define a dominant discourse and its extension
• and proposes the concept of monument: such a concept will be useful for framing an era as well as for a comparison of different periods in history