Una filosofia prima della filosofia. Royer-Collard, Jouffroy, Cousin

Focusing on the debate with conservative counterrevolution on the one hand and the revolutionary philosophy of the subject on the other, French liberalism in the first half of the XIX century (Royer-Collard, Jouffroy, Cousin) proposed not a philosophy of politics but, rather, a politics of philosophy with a view to stabilizing postrevolutionary society. In reconstructing this politics of philosophy, the Author concentrates on the rehabilitation of philosophy as rational discourse (against the counterrevolution), on the recovery of the networks of social knowledge produced by common sense (against the philosophy of the Revolution) and, above all, on the theory of impersonal reason developed at the Sorbonne after its reopening at the beginning of the Restauration. The philosophy of the doctrinarians is presented as a crucial moment in the strategy of a «governmental liberalism» of the kind that French liberals were aiming for.