Luc Ferry: "Universalism has gone from left to right"

Formerly, the democratic left was embodied in the tradition which goes from Jaurès to Chevènement.

She defended an idea of ​​the nation inseparable from republican universalism.

Heir to 1789, she was faithful to the scientific revolution as well as to the heritage of human rights, to what Claude Lefort called

"abstract humanism"

, to this conviction that a human being is sacred, apart from his community roots in a culture, a language, a class, a race or even a nation, stateless persons also being worthy of protection.

This universalism was opposed to the communitarianism which came from the counter-revolutionary extreme right, that of Maistre, Bonald and the German romantics, for whom Man is really Man only as a "member" of a "social body" , of a defined nation, as opposed to our republican nation, as an almost biological community.

To read also:

Jacques Julliard: "Catholicism, republic, socialism: the bankruptcy of three universalisms"

We were a few, Bruckner in

The Sanglot of the White Man

, Renaut and I in

La Pensée

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