L'etat, l'individu et le philosophe: une introduction au systeme philosophico-politique d'Eric Weil

Abstract

Eric Weil was perhaps one of the last philosophers who have consciously built a system. His philosophy has distinguished itself through the positive and fully philosophical assertion of politics and the fervent need of understanding and explaining reality. Just like on a chessboard, Weil has introduced individuals and institutions and studied their relations. Of the state, he has conveyed a structural definition by appealing to the image of a form enabling to a given community conscious decision-making. By capturing how the State becomes, how it acquires a meaning, this article offers an insight on Eric Weil’s political thought, which is the source of an original model of comprehension and understanding of the modern state. Weil's writings endorse here two main criteria: the ideal of the defence of individual liberties and the principle of a coherent discursive action of the thinker, who has to denounce any kind of violence, to educate and to prompt discussion. The analysis focuses on the book named La philosophie politique (Vrin, Paris, 1956), which shows, in its two first chapters, how the moral issue leads on to the political one and describes, in the last two chapters, how the structure of the political issues has made necessary for the statesman to reconcile with moral.