諦念としての歴史哲学

【ジュゼッペ・フェッラーリの歴史理論】

抄録

  The thought of Giuseppe Ferrari (1811-1876) as historical thinker was just recently called back from oblivion. The fact that many of his writings were hardly available has contributed to the establishment of his position as a positivist thinker, who misconstrued objective history (as Benedetto Croce puts it). However, it seems doubtful to consider Ferrari's a positivistic, scientificaly based notion of historical objectivity. First of all, even during the period when his writings were published, only a few people in France were able to understand his true intentions. The character of his historical descriptions cannot be grasped without sufficient inquiry into the process of his thinking about history. The purpose of this paper is to show in what sense his late work “Histoire de la raison d' Etat” (1860) should be read.

  This paper actresses firstly Ferrari's early writings (from 1840 to 1843) discussing the “principle” of his philosophy of history. Ferrari grounded his conception of history on “principles,” rather than factual accumulation. He found out the “principle” in Vico, figure of the Renaissance. And the “principle” of the Renaissance was set on the origin of the Reformation and the French Revolution. As his theory of philosophy of history is based on commitment to the revolutionary principle, it receives suppression by the official philosophy represented by Victor Cousin, which had established the liberalist compromise between philosophy and ecclesiastic power. The “limit” of the philosophy of history which Ferrari has faced is the fact that the philosophical possibility is no more affirmed inside a philosophical system itself.

  I discuss, therefore, two other books, written from the perspective of the “limit” of the philosophy of history, in which Ferrari develops his new perspective on History : “Les philosophes salariés” and “Machiavel, juge des révolutions de notre temps” (1849). The first belongs to the genealogy of “refutation of eclecticism” by Pierre Leroux. In his “Réfutation de l' eclécticisme” (1839), Leroux explains how the official philosophy was constituted by the negation of the enlightnment philosophy of the 18^th century. For Leroux, the philosophy of the 19^th century signified the negation of the possiblity of philosophy itself. In the latter, written in the same year as the first one, Machiavel appears, in contrast to Vico, as a figure “without principle.” Through this topos of the figure of Machiavel, one can see that History consists in a discontinuous temporality, devoid of any principle. What Ferrari clarifies in his later “Histoire de raison d' Etat”, is also the discontinuity of History and historical temporality as “fate” (fatalité), itself irreducible to something like the positivist or theological “providence.” This work contains important references, which help reconsidering the historical recognition between the February revolution and the Second Imperial Regime of France, including Marx and Baudelaire. It will be hence necessary, from now on, to recognize the importance of his historical theory in the domain of 19^th century social and political thought.