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Nation, Justice and Liberty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Extract

A nation is not a creation of the brain but a collective experience. It does not equal the sum of the individuals that compose it but transcends that sum like a global personality that is not only juridical (although there once was a “League of Nations”) but also moral in the highest sense of the word.

We may ask ourselves if liberty is indetermination, nonalienation and autonomy in its accomplishment; if it is congenial in the genetic code of the nation for its entire existence or, on the contrary, if there is not a sort of dialectic, that is, historic, aleatory and problematic relationship between these two realities. In fact, there is danger in the desire to find a similarity, even by analogy, between the life of nations and a biological process. The nation is a historical phenomenon appearing through a chain of circumstances in 19th-century Europe, theorized by Europe and often born elsewhere as a reaction to European imperialism. The Nation is largely a bourgeois idea and reality.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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