Milieu et peuples. Entre les traités hippocratiques et Aristote

The article compares some of the so-called Hippocratic treatises and Aristotle’s Physics, Meteorologics, Ethics and Politics, on what would define a human community, if not a nation. It shows a common absence of the notions of climate and environment but a close way of conceiving the physical continuity between the outside world (immediate or more distant) and the inside of living bodies. Then, the external conditions (seasons, temperatures, nature of the soil) similarly determine the complexions and characters of the populations that experience them. Divergences occur due to the determinism of the external conditions on politics. The Hippocratic treaties do not recognise this, unlike Aristotle, except that the Stagirite excludes from this determinism the Greek City and the virtues, including the civic virtue of justice.

Kant e il carattere dei popoli

Kant deals with national characters in the second part of his Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view of 1798. Firmly rejecting the climatic theory, he advocates an anti-naturalistic stance. However, Kant is skeptical of Hume’s tenet that nations owe their characters to their different forms of government. In Kant’s view, the most civilized nations are England and France: their characters have to do with purely cultural factors. Complementing each other, the characters of those nations broadly correspond to a masculine and feminine principle, as analyzed by Kant in the previous chapter of his Anthropology. The remaining European and Extra-European nations have a less defined – and, in some cases, mixed – character, that owes something more to the natural dispositions. Yet Kant still manages to avoid naturalistic explanations. In many nations, natural dispositions do prevail over cultural ones, but this simply means that less (and sometimes, nothing) can be said about their characters.

Da Verri a Cuoco. Il dibattito sul carattere degli Italiani tra Sette e Ottocento

Even today, Italians tend to adopt a double imagine of their national character, played on the contrast between an evolved and conscious minority (‘us’) and a backward and typically pre-modern majority (‘them’). As Giulio Bollati has shown better than any other in a famous essay, this self-representation draws its origins first of all from the period between the late Enlightenment and the early Napoleonic age, in which for the first time the Peninsula was called to deal with the models imposed by the great European modernization. The paper aims to reconstruct the process that led some of the most prominent political thinkers of this years (Baretti, Verri, Gioia, Botta, Cuoco) to adopt the image mentioned above - and this privileging the approach of the constitutional history.

Il carattere di Jules Michelet

The article deals with the national character in Jules Michelet. Michelet supports an essentialist version of the character. According him, it is caused by natural elements: geography, food and the various regions that make up France. These elements are spiritualized over time: it is the history that gave rise to the character of the French. The result is the complete fusion of all differences in a nation-individual: a generous person towards humanity. The French character is contrasted with the English character: selfish, greedy, all devoted to work and earnings. It is precisely because of their different characters that France has given the world the Revolution and England the Industrial Revolution, a phenomenon that mechanizes work, that destroys the body and soul of the workers.

Bodin e la teoria climatica in epoca moderna

It was Federico Chabod who recognized in Jean Bodin's theory of climate the merging, in the middle of the sixteenth century, of the «scattered seeds» of an essentially naturalistic idea of nation, still far from the modern conception of the nation as «a spiritual fact». Bodin (1529-1596) was one of the greatest exponents of French legal humanism. Reworking and updateing in his major works (Methodus, 1566; République, 1576-1586; Universae naturae theatrum, 1596) a long dating back theme, Bodin presented the characters of nations as dependent on climatic situations: the cold north with the torpid ingenuity of the inhabitants, the hot south with subtle ingenuity, and the middle zone of temperate nations. That theory, which soon became a stereotype until its reworking in Montesquieu's Esprit des lois, actually played a more decisive role in the genesis of the modern concept of nation, made visible for the first time, albeit in a symbolic and imaginary way.

Il «sistema dell’egoismo universale» e la condizione presente dell’Italia

I intend to deal with the political thought of Giacomo Leopardi, especially in the Zibaldone, according to his conceptions on the contrast between reason and nature and on the contrast between ancient and modern, focusing attention on his analysis of the morale of the Italians, in order to identify their original line of interpretation in the analysis of the relationship between individuals and nations in the modern age, and in Italy in particular. The analysis of his political reflection cannot be separated from that of his moral and anthropological vision on the human condition. I dwell on three moments of his moral, social and anthropological vision of the nation, with a focus on the theme of individualism and the system of universal selfishness typical of Modernity.

Aria di casa. Du Bos e il carattere delle piante-nazione

Plants-Nations have very different characters in different countries or in different ages in the same country; like wines, in every terroir they have a particular taste and always preserve it, though some years are better than others. Everything depends upon the air and its qualities. It is a home air, but it is not always the same. National characters are the product of a (changeable) balance between identity and diversity, permanent general elements and variations in time. Jean-Baptiste Du Bos’ Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, first published in 1719, attempt to keep this balance and present themselves as an indispensable reading for those who want to discuss national characters and their causes even in 1748, when Montesquieu published the Esprit des lois and Hume Of National Characters.